Hitachi Unveils World’s First Terabyte DVD Recorder

Japan’s Hitachi Ltd. on Wednesday unveiled the world’s first hard disk drive/DVD recorder that can store one terabyte of data, or enough to record about 128 hours of high-definition digital broadcasting.

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Hitachi said the new models would be the first on the market able to simultaneously record two high-definition programs, and it hopes this will be a key selling point given the spread of terrestrial digital broadcasting in Japan.

The recorders will go on sale in Japan from next month. They are expected to retail from about 130,000 yen for the cheapest model to 230,000 yen for the one-terabyte recorder, which stores data on two 500 gigabyte hard disk drives.

One terabyte is equal to 1 trillion bytes of data. One gigabyte equals 1 billion bytes.

Hitachi said it did not have concrete plans for launching the products in overseas markets, explaining that consumers in Europe and the United States were not as keen on high-end recorders.

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