February 5 - 4:15pm EST   Hitachi on Wednesday announced the upcoming release of the CinemaStar C5K500 2.5-inch hard drive available in capacities up to 500GB that sports a halogen-free design and low read/write power consumption which, at 1.4W, represents a 22 percent reduction than the older drives. The small form-factor drive is meant for use in DVRs, set-top boxes and video surveillance systems. The 160GB, 250GB, 320GB and 500GB drives feature 5,400RPM speeds. [full story]

July 30 - 9:25am EDT   Hitachi this morning launched a pair of CinemaStar drives for users of DVRs and any other computer or device that needs to run for long periods of time. The 1TB 7K1000.B relies on the same basic design as its normal DeskStar counterpart but is tuned to run all day and in harsher conditions. The new version is both more resilient against high temperatures as well as modified to run more quietly while it seeks data on the drive. The disk further borrows power optimization tricks from Hitachi's notebook drives to cut down on its energy draw. [full story]