If there is one common truth about external storage solutions it is that you always use more capacity than you think you will. This is especially true of you are the type who produces and consumes lots of digital media. Hitachi has announced several new external storage devices boasting 2TB of space.

The external solutions include the SimpleDrive USB 2.0 storage solution selling for $249.99. It works with both Mac and Windows computers. Hitachi also crammed 2TB of storage inside its SimpleTech line of solutions. The SimpleTech Pro Drive has USB, FireWire 400/800, and eSATA connectivity to go along with its 2TB HDD for $299.99.

I love my DVR and out of all the tech in my home, my DVR and my computer are the two devices that I just can’t live without. What I always want in my DVR is more storage; the measly 20GB that DirecTV gives me just doesn’t cut it.

Hitachi announced two new hard drives today that are aimed at use in DVRs and HTPC computers. The drives are the 1TB CinemaStar 7K1000.C and the 1TB CinemaStar 5K1000 CoolSpin. Both of the drives are optimized for streaming video.

No matter what sort of crap you fill your hard drive with from porn, to digital photos, or music we always seem to need more space. At one point people thought they would never need more than a few megabytes of storage space. Today we know those people were loons.

Hitachi has announced the industry’s first 2TB hard drive that spins at 7200 rpm. The drive is the Deskstar 7K2000 and uses five platters to reach its capacity. Hitachi has platters that are 500GB each so why exactly it takes five is unknown.

Hitachi is looking to take advantage of the education market, so the company has developed some new electronic blackboards. New and improved versions of the transformed PX-DUO-50 electronic blackboards will be resurrected in each of the elementary and junior high schools in Japan. Costing about ¥700,000, the electronic blackboards have a PC built-in and use a detection device consisting of two infrared cameras, with the lens having a field angle of 170°.

Measuring 50-inches, the blackboards support all of the character input and character recognition that teachers need and come with a terrestrial digital TV tuner.

Hitachi has released the SimpleTough and SimpleDrive Mini USB drives, along with SimpleNet. At $79, SimpleNet is a useful little USB to Ethernet box that turns the SimpleTough or SimpleDrive into a network attached storage (NAS) device on your local network.

SimpleNet works wirh non-Hitachi drives too. The USB drive appears as a drive on the network so you can easily share your pics, movies, tunes and documents with everyone on your network.

Hitachi is back with some new LCD HDTV product lines in the form of the UltraVision and Alpha series. Ultravision features the best picture quality, the latest 1080p technology, support for up to 8 High Definition inputs, with five HDMI pure digital inputs. It also boasts a trim and light design that is easy to swivel for any viewing position you need, as well as an ENERGY STAR qualification. A built-in ATSC/QAM/NTSC tuner lets users access their HD channels easily.

The Alpha series will give you four HDMI pure digital inputs, three HD inputs, a similar ENERGY STAR qualification, RGB input and a swivel stand.

Saving a few watts by using a more energy efficient hard drive isn’t high on the list of priorities for most businesses and your average computer user. The savings in electricity for most of us won’t offset the cost of replacing a hard drive. However, for large data centers saving a few watts per hard drive can equate to millions of dollars.

Hitachi has announced its latest energy efficient hard drive aimed at the enterprise market called the Ultrastar C10K300. The drive spins at 10,000 RPM and connects to servers via an SAS interface. The drive has a 2.5-inch form factor helping to save space in crowded server environments.

There is nothing that makes most consumers angrier than having to pay more for something than it is worth. A few years ago several of the world’s largest LCD panel makers conspired together to fix the price of TFT-LCD panels and sold the panels at inflated prices to computer makers.

So far several companies have been fined, including LG and Chunghwa Picture Tubes. Today the U.S. DOJ has announced that Hitachi has agreed to plead guilty and pay a fine of $31 million for its part in the LCD price fixing conspiracy.

Japanese cell phone maker KDDI has teamed up with Hitachi to one-up your iPhone as the iPhone can’t manage 3D content. The Hitachi WOOO H001 will show you 3D versions of your phone’s still images and video.

But that’s not all, the phone also will give you a 5 megapixel camera, Bluetooth, microSD slot, and a 1Seg TV tuner. No word on price, but the handset should hit the Asian market by spring.

There are many uses today for hard drives optimized for storing and streaming video files. Uses for this type of drive include DVRs, video work stations, and video surveillance applications. Hitachi has announced its latest video centric drive that is added to its CinemaStar line.

The new drive is called the CinemaStar C5K500 and is a 2.5-inch drive offering a maximum capacity of 500GB. The small drive is designed for silent operation, cool running, and low power usage. The rotational speed of the drive is 5400 rpm and is uses Hitachi SmoothStream technology to enhance digital video streaming applications.

The future of touch and gesture interface technology continues it’s rapid march forward, but traditional hardware interface devices are still making improvements. Hitachi recently showed off a new kind of television remote control specifically designed for the computer savvy needs of IPTV viewers. It may look like a crystal ball, but it won’t…or maybe it will reveal the future.

The idea is to get away from all of those buttons and make the process of using an onscreen GUI an intuitively simple process. Which is how it should be. No word yet on release date or price, but we are hoping to see it soon. Regular TV remotes are so last century.

Hitachi isn’t a name you hear as often in the consumer electronics realm as Sony or Samsung. Despite that, Hitachi makes some fantastic home theater and AV products. I own one of their plasma TVs and it is by far the best set I have tested. Hitachi is branching into the professional market with its latest AV projector.

The projector is called the CP-X10000 and offers a whopping 7,500 lumens of brightness and a contrast ratio of 2500:1. The projector offers ultra-wide range lens shift and a 10-bit full digital video processor along with a 10,000-hour filter.

Storage capacities are growing for both desktop and portable computers. Notebooks still can’t match the storage capacity available in many desktop computers, but the gap is closing. Hitachi announced its latest notebook HDD today that offers lots of storage and green features built-in.

The hard drive is called the Travelstar 5K500.B and has 500GB of storage space wile consuming only 1.4W during read/write operations. The drives are also halogen free making them more environmentally friendly.

Hard drive capacities are growing all the time, which is great news for computer users with lots of stuff to store. More storage capacity is also great news for DVR users looking to be able to record more programming before their hard drive fills up.

Today Hitachi announced a pair of new hard drives in its CinemaStar line. The flagship product is the CinemaStar 7K1000.B with up to 1TB of storage space. Hitachi previously announced a 1TB desktop drive a few weeks back. Other capacities are available for the 7K1000.B in addition to the 1TB version. Hitachi also announced the CinemaStar 5K320 with 320GB of storage space. The 1TB drive can store 247 hours of MPEG-4 HD video.

Hitachi is upping the stakes in notebook hard drive storage sizes as CES approaches by unveiling today the world’s highest capacity 2.5-inch mobile hard drive. Expect to see the new 500GB Travelstar 5K500 showing up in laptops sometime in February.

The Hitachi Travelstar 5K500, which will also be available in a slightly smaller 400GB model, is the company’s fourth generation mobile drive to use perpendicular magnetic recording technology. In exact storage terms you can fit on the 500GB drive up to 500 hours of digital video, 178 feature length movies, 250 games or 125,000 four-minute songs. These drives will be available with a 3.0Gb/s Serial ATA (SATA) interface and will include vibration protection technology against bumps which might impact system performance.