Coming to a PVR Near You: Hitachi’s 400gb hard Drive

Snappily titled the Deskstar 7K400, the drive is currently under test by equipment manufacturers hoping to use it in their products, and could be incorporated into PVRs late in the year. The 400gb drive is available with a PATA or newer SATA interface and spins at 7200 rpm, pretty much the standard these days. The drive uses 3.5” platters, so won’t be suitable for mobile devices. Currently, the highest capacity 3.5” drive is around 250gb.

Hitachi hopes the drive will give it a bigger role in the consumer electronics market due to the rapid growth of PVRs, hard disk recorders and media hubs in the home. Last year Apple bought 730,000 units of hard disks from Hitachi’s competitor Toshiba, so obviously they’re keen to see some of that business in future.

400gb translates to about 400 hours of broadcast television, or about 45 hours of HDTV. Or nearly a year’s worth of MP3s.

Apple’s hard drive future

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Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people.Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon.At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC.After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video.These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?