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Hitachi Movie Visualizes Future Hard Drive Lifestyle; Vision of 10-15 Hard Drive-Based Devices Per Home at Heart of Hitachi Strategy for New Consumer Era (26/11/2004)

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is today premiering its short film, "Unsung Heroes," which depicts a family whose struggles are ameliorated by their interactions with hard disk drives. The six-minute movie features an all-star hard-drive cast, including the Hitachi Travelstar, Deskstar, Ultrastar, Endurastar and Microdrive. "Unsung Heroes" is opening worldwide today at a web browser near you: http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/endigitalhome.

"Hitachi believes there will be 10-20 hard drives in the average digital home within the next 5-7 years, which will propel us into the fourth and most exciting era of hard-drive adoption -- the Consumer Era," said Bill Healy, senior vice president, strategy and marketing, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "We introduced hard disk drive technology nearly 50 years ago to provide storage for room-sized mainframe computers, and we're now doing the same for palm-sized devices. In effect, we've taken hard drives from the board room, to the living room and on the road."

The Consumer Era is preceeded by the PC Era of the 1980's and 1990's, the Mini Computer Era of the 1960's and 1970's, and the Mainframe Era of the 1950's. Each subsequent era saw the reduction of the physical size of the hard drive, an increase in storage capacity, greater affordability and practical usage, and an ever-growing demand.

Hard Drives -- The New Bragging Right

"Unsung Heroes" is Hitachi's attempt to personalize consumers' relationship with their hard drives, which in the past have been relegated to an unseen, unheard and under-appreciated technology. But the crucial role that hard drives play, especially in today's digital Consumer Era, has transposed the previously lowly hard drive into what's now a bragging right. Consumer devices today are often defined by the size -- both capacity and physical dimensions -- of their hard drives.

As more and more of consumers' precious content is stored on hard drives, Hitachi believes quality will be more critical than capacity and size. Hard drives will become a means of not only to store but also to protect consumers' photos, movies, music, documents. Already, today, consumers can recognize Hitachi's high standard of quality by the "Hard Drive by Hitachi" logo on their digital devices. For example, the Hitachi logo has been implemented on the Dell DJ, RocDigital ROCBOX, Creative NOMAD MuVo2, Archos Pocket Video Recorder AV420 and the Legend digital TV receiver/personal video recorder, among others.

Broadest CE-Hard Drive Portfolio

The hard drive opportunity for consumer electronics is the fastest-growing segment in the industry. IDC predicts that by 2007, 70 million or 20 percent of all hard drives shipped annually will be in consumer electronic devices.

"These CE devices, in addition to the millions and millions of consumer personal PCs purchased each year, offer strong support for Hitachi's portfolio of CE-focused hard drives," Healy added.

Hitachi offers hard drives tailored for consumer electronic devices, including one-inch, 1.8-inch, 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch for applications that range from MP3 jukeboxes, portable/automotive audio and video players, digital still/video cameras, navigation devices, set-top boxes, digital video recorders, gaming machines, mobile phones and many more. This all-star hard-drive cast can be seen live, in person, in a life-sized digital home at the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, January 6-9. Please visit them at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies exhibit #H25342, South Hall, first floor.

With small size being a highly sought-after feature in portable consumer devices, Hitachi also offers the broadest portfolio of small-form-factor hard drives. To further support this, Hitachi recently announced its participation in a new industry organization, alongside Intel, to define the CE-ATA interface, which will be customized to the needs of handheld and portable consumer electronic devices such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants and MP3 players. The new interface is intended to address CE-specific requirements such as low pin-count, low voltage, power efficiency, cost-effectiveness and integration efficiency.

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