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.

Hitachi today announced another step forward in packing more data into the same sized hard disks with what is now the world’s smallest read-head technology for hard disks. While others (Hitachi themselves included) are starting to turn to solid state drives or hybrid drives with advantages of moving parts, faster response times and less power consumption, Hitachi continues to make advances on the HDD front stating it continues to provide a better capacity to cost ratio than other technologies.

Today Hitachi has announced two new Blu-ray disc camcorders which they are calling the worlds first camcorders that can record high-definition video to Blu-ray. Both camcorders have the ability to record full high-definition video directly to a single-side, single-layer Blu-ray disc giving up to one hour of 1920×1080 resolution video on the disc.

The DZ-BD7H model is actually a “hybrid” camcorder with the ability to record the high-definition video to either the Blu-ray disc or an internal 30GB hard drive which can hold up to four hours of the 1920×1080 high-def video. Once recorded onto …

Hitachi has been busy this week showcasing their Fall 2007 line up of plasma displays for the masses. These models range in size from 50- to 60-inches and price from around $3,000 to $8,000.

The most impressive of the models Hitachi is preparing is a 60-inch Director’s Series plasma (P60X901). This model, like select others in the new plasma line up, comes loaded with cutting edge viewing technologies. These include, in a nut shell, 1920 x 1080 resolution, 2-million pixels and something the company is calling Reel60. This last feature is designed …

When the CeBIT show arrives in Hannover, Germany later this week one of the must-see pieces of hardware will be Hitachi-LG Data Storage’s first dual Blu-ray/HD-DVD internal drive for PCs. This baby was just announced and bears the swank product name of GGW-H10N Super Multi Blue. It can read, record and re-write CDs, DVDs, play and record single and dual-layered Blu-ray discs (4x or 3.5x speeds) and play HD-DVDs (no record on those babys just yet.)

The Super Multi Blues will start arriving in stores sometime in May, and as is always the …

Today Hitachi has announced that it will be the industries first in the world to offer a 1 terabyte hard drive. The 1,000 GB drive (for those having trouble with the metric system) will be available to retail consumers in the first quarter of this year, and will come under the name ‘Deskstar 7K1000′ retailing for $399. Hitachi states that the 40 cents per gig (for those having trouble with the math) will make the larger capacity an accessible price for more customers.

This announcement comes within hours of …

Not long after Seagate announced its disc level security encryption, Hitachi was right behind them unveiling new 2.5 inch notebook drives for 2007 that have greater capacities, require less power due to flash memory utilization, and have encryption security right on the disk.

The encryption, similar to what is being done with disk level encryption by Seagate, happens right on the disk which allows it to be “bound” with a device and helps avoid having data stolen or lost since it encrypted at the disk level and doesn’t need an application to implement …