Hitachi CinemaStar Drives Target Video Nuts

Capitalizing on consumers' hunger for digital video, Hitachi has announced new high-capacity 3.5-inch hard drives designed for DVR and media center use.

Digital video is a rapidly growing market, and one thing’s for sure: you need a lot of drive space to store digital video. Hitachi aims to capitalize on those storage needs with its new CinemaStar line of hard drives, which the company says are designed explicitly for the consumer electronics video market.

The CinemaStar 7K500 and 7K160 should be available in the early third quarter of 2006, and based on Hitachi’s Deskstar drives. What makes them ideal for consumer digital video? Hitachi says they sport “bedroom-quiet” silent seek acoustics, have lower power demands for cooler operation, a wider operational temperature range (so tey cope better in enclosed spaces like entertainment centers), and adaptive error recovery for optimized data streaming.

“We believe the CinemaStar is the capstone of Hitachi’s efforts thus far in developing hard drives for CE applications,” said Jose Antelo, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies’s VP and general manager of business management. “The CinemaStar not only integrates focused CE functionality, but it also offers a logical branding scheme, which makes it easily recognizable to customers looking for a digital-video-based or other CE-specific storage solution.”

Hitachi plans to release the CinemaStar 7K500 drive in two- and three-disk designs with capacities of 250, 320, 400, and 500 GB, while the 7K160 will be a one-disk drive with 80 to 160 GB of storage.

I think Hitachi missed the best headline here: they should have gone with something like “At last: the perfect hard drive for your bedroom.”