Hitachi Makes 400-Gigabyte Hard Drive

Associated Press ^ | March 13, 2004 | May Wong

[antiRepublicrat]

A common trick on machines in the old days was to burn your own OS on EPROMS.

And a lot of machines just came that way by default, like the original Mac and Ataris. Up to modern times, I've been thinking of booting off a 512MB flash card on my notebook just to see how fast Windows gets going.

[Cooter]

The AP is talking TiVo and other PVR storage, which is 1 GB/hour using highest compression (lowest quality).

[savedbygrace]

I suppose for most people that's acceptable. Is 1GB/hr for real? I'm not questioning you, just expressing amazement.

[Cooter]

For real. I own a "40-hour" TiVo as well as a ReplayTV 5040 (also 40-hour). Each machine has a 40 GB hard drive. I pulled this off of the ReplayTV web site:

Question: How many shows can I record on my ReplayTV?

Answer: You can record as many shows as you want, if you have space available. You can record shows at Standard, Medium, or High quality. If you have a 5504(40 Gigabytes), you can record 40hrs at Standard quality.

* A 1Hr News program, recorded at Standard quality, would take up 1GB(Gigabyte) of hard disk space.

* A 1Hr News program, recorded at Medium quality, would take up 2GB (Gigabytes) of hard disk space.

* A 1Hr News program, recorded at High quality, would take up 3GB (Gigabytes) of hard disk space.

Your 5504, which records 40hrs at Standard quality, will record 20hrs at Medium quality, or 13hrs and 20 minutes at High quality.

ReplayTV saves files in MPEG-2 format. Lowest quality uses "half D1" resolution (352x480) with a VBR of < 2Mbps. I think these are the specs:

VIDEO: VBR MPEG-2
Resolution 352 x 480
Aspect ratio is 4:3
Frame rate 29.97 fps
Nominal bitrate 1820000 bps

AUDIO:
MPEG-1, Layer 2
48.0 kHz, Stereo
Bitrate 224 kbps

This quality is acceptable for capturing news programs, and similar shows without much action, that I will delete immediately after watching. For sports or movies that I want to save, medium quality is acceptable. I almost never use high quality because, to me, it's not worth using twice the space for an incremental increase in video quality.

TiVo has a similar quality/space tradeoff but I think they use a proprietary encoding.

[JimDingle]

Yep. I reckon in the future, people will just record everything, all the time as a way to back up their memories. You mean were going to be "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank"?

[glasseye]

Hitichi? Were they the company who, during the Reagen administration sold lathe and computer equipment to the USSR for the milling of submarine props?

If I recall that move cost the us tapayer 50-100 BILLION dollars in reduced intel ability due to the now quieter russian boats.

I just know never to buy Hitachi.

Am I wrong?

[glasseye]

I am wrong....it was Toshiba.

My bad

Too much coffie this morning, or was it too little?