14 DAY TRIAL // Digital video recorders and set-top boxes with recording capabilities are becoming increasingly important nowadays, as they allow users to enjoy their favorite shows even when they don't have the necessary time to watch them exactly when they're aired. And this is the reason why the people over at Hitachi came up with two new lines of HDDs designed especially for the aforementioned category of devices, namely the 2.5-inch CinemaStar C5K250 series and the 3.5-inch CinemaStar P7K500 series, all included in the big CinemaStar family.
The CinemaStar P7K500 family offers quite a high level of versatility, as it's available in several models (250 / 320 / 500 GB versions, with 7200 RPM, 8 MB data buffer, 4.17 ms average latency, as well as PATA-133 and 3Gb/s SATA interfaces), designed to fit the needs of a wide array of customers. The new drives are based on Hitachi's recently-introduced Deskstar P7K500, which are extremely frugal on power consumption. Moreover, they include a special feature called AV-Zoning, which allows data recovery procedures to be defined differently for multiple partitions on the same drive. In this way, critical system data can be differentiated from time critical video content, which may not require the same stringent data recovery measures.
The 2.5-inch CinemaStar C5K250 is designed to meet the needs of a growing number of manufacturers who wish to offer video recording and playback features in a small form factor. The drive uses the same SmoothStream technology as its larger 3.5-inch CinemaStar "sibling," but offers reduced size, low power and quiet acoustics, all while providing ample capacity of up to 250GB (80/120/160/250 GB, 5400 RPM, 5.5 ms average latency and a Serial ATA 1.5Gb/s interface). Furthermore, the low power capability, combined with the large storage capacity, enables the design of portable and/or battery-powered Personal Media Players (PMP) and ultra-slim, reduced footprint set-top boxes that still offer the same functionality as the much larger units seen in many households today.
"DVR capacity constraints are becoming more acute with the growth of HDTV, and consumers are feeling a bigger storage crunch with the explosion of digital music and photos," according to John Rydning, Research Manager for hard disk drives at IDC. "Hitachi's new CinemaStar disk drives provide a range of form factors and capacities designed for low power and quiet 24x7 operation to address key DVR requirements across a wide variety of personal video recording devices."
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