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Living-Room Hard Drives

Hitachi's new My Library Video Edition and similar devices vie for a place in your home entertainment setup.

Alan Stafford, PC World

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Hitachi's Cinemastar Series, Seagate's DB35 Series, and Western Digital's new My Library Video Edition are part of a wave of hard drives meant for living-room entertainment devices. "Access time and speed aren't important factors [with video]," says Western Digital's Cathy Scott. The $200, 500GB My Library Video Edition uses a fast eSATA connection but has a slow seek time so that it delivers data just in time, thereby reducing power consumption and noise. Its Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) rate of 1 million hours is higher than that of WD's desktop drives, though Scott won't say how much higher.

The My Library Video Edition works only with Scientific Atlanta 8300 series DVRs, but Scott says to "stay tuned" for other compatible devices. One candidate is the new TiVo HD, which has an eSATA port. Unfortunately, TiVo hasn't enabled it yet.

For our appraisals of external hard drives evaluated by the PC World Test Center, see Top 5 External Hard Drives.

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