Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, a Western Digital company, today announced a new family of CinemaStar 2.5-inch hard disk drives (HDDs) for the traditional and small form factor audio/video (A/V) and consumer electronics (CE) HDD markets.

From slim 7mm z-height 500GB HDDs to high-capacity, 2.5-inch, 9.5mm 1TB HDDs, HGST's new CinemaStar family targets the vast majority of CE capacity needs, while providing a balance of performance, low power and quiet acoustics for multi-stream digital video recorders (DVRs) and set-top-boxes (STBs).

The new CinemaStar family includes:

- CinemaStar Z7K500 Family for High Performance A/V Streaming - The CinemaStar Z7K500 family is the industry's first one-disk, 7mm, 7200 RPM, 2.5-inch drive designed for high-performance A/V streaming. It delivers speed, power-efficiency and design flexibility for uninterrupted content delivery and storage. The 7mm CinemaStar Z7K500 drive can be a direct replacement for standard 9.5mm hard drives and is well suited for slim TV integration, and multi-tuner DVRs and STBs. The CinemaStar Z7K500 family comes with a 6Gb/s SATA interface and a 32MB cache buffer, and is available in 500GB, 320GB and 250GB capacities.

- The new CinemaStar C5K1000 drive delivers a 1TB capacity in a 2.5-inch form factor. The new 5,400 RPM, 9.5mm, 2.5-inch CinemaStar C5K1000 family delivers read/write power as low as 1.5 watts (W) and a quiet operation at 2.4 bels idle. The drive family is available in 1TB, 750GB and 640GB capacities.

- The CinemaStar Z5K500 offering is HGST's second-generation, 7mm, 5400 RPM, 2.5-inch CE HDD family, featuring a one-disk design with 500GB, 320GB and 250GB capacities. It has a slim 7mm HDD design, power as low as 1.4W during read/write operations and a barely audible sound at 1.9 idle bels.

All CinemaStar drives feature HGST?s patented SmoothStream technology, which supports the ATA-7 streaming command set, and SMART command transport (SCT) provides time-limited error recovery and thermal monitoring capabilities for a longer system life.

The new 2.5-inch CinemaStar family is now shipping in limited quantities.