Ian Grayson12 November 2007, 3:14 AM
Tired of noisy PVR hard drives interrupting your viewing pleasure? The latest offering from Hitachi might be just what you need.
 Whisper quiet hard drive - The Hitachi P7K500 |
There's nothing more annoying than watching a suspenseful movie scene only to have the silence punctuated by your PVR's hard drive grinding away in the background.
As hard drive storage become a standard feature in home recorders, manufacturers have become acutely aware of the need to keep the whirring devices as quiet as possible.
With this in mind, Hitachi has taken the wraps off two new CinemaStar drives designed specifically for use in the consumer electronics sector.
The 3.5-inch CinemaStar P7K500 offers 500GB of storage which Hitachi says can swallow 178 movies and 125,000 music tracks. It's been designed specifically for PVRs and set-top boxes.
The drive incorporates Hitachi's SmoothStream technology which allows it to overcome errors or missing chunks of data without interrupting the video stream.
Acoustics have also been improved, allowing the drive to operate at a so-called "bedroom quiet" level. If a pin drops in the movie, you'll probably be able to hear it.
Meanwhile the 2.5-inch CinemaStar C5K250 is targeted at manufacturers of portable media devices. In this segment, power consumption is just as important as acoustics and so Hitachi has focused on reducing the drive's hunger for electricity.
The C5K250 switches to a 0.55 watt idle power mode if playback or recording is not used for a set period of time. Its low profile also means it needs less power to spin.
Both drives come with a choice of either Parallel ATA (PATA) or Serial ATA (SATA) interfaces to give box designers flexibility.