James Delahunty
14 Apr 2007 19:24
Western Digital has developed a range of IDE and SATA hard disks featuring capacities up to 500GB, designed with use with audio-video content. The company claims that 500GB is sufficient for "30 hours of HD video". The drives have been tweaked to be suitable for AV applications. The company claims they can deliver playback of 12 HD streams at once and can be used for CCTV to record 16 standard-definition streams simultaneously.
Digital video recorders (DVR), HDTV and other new video-related technologies created whole new demands for hard disk drives. Putting performance aside, even just creating drives that perform quieter than their standard counterparts is essential. They must also be much more reliable.
"These are not for desktop PCs," said WD technician Alexander Patterson. "They are for DVR, PVR, set-top boxes and low-end security systems." A new feature called IntelliSeek synchs the head movement to disk spin, so the head arrives at the right moment to read the data it wants as it passes underneath. This cuts both power consumption and noise.
Source:
The Register