Have you ever wondered what your favorite company is up to? Would you like to know more about their decisions, (new) products and background information? Now you can! CD Freaks is organizing a series of interviews with digital storage related persons. The coming time we will ask them what you want to know!

Here some examples of types of questions you could ask:

Current products
New products
Company information
Market details / outlook
Future opportunities
Personal questions for the person

What’s next?
This week we will ask questions to Hitachi.

Please post your questions below in this thread. Next week, all questions will be collected. We pick the best ones and report the answers back on CD Freaks.com! So, stay tuned!

Mind you, this is not an engineer, if you have very technical questions you're better of posting them in a thread here.

#1 - What is the road map for 2.5" SATA drives to be released for 2008? Drive Size, RPM, and Approx Date.

#2 - Is it true that some 2.5" drives will be too thick to fit in current laptops? Which of the above drives have this issue?

#3 - I've heard that some of the latest big 2.5" SATA drives are only available to computer manufacturers and not the public. If there are two different dates, then also please tell us when some of the large drives will be available for us to order and install into our own personal laptop computers.

#4 - What is the road map for 3.5" drives for 2008?

#5 - Do you plan to release any 1TB or larger 3.5" PATA drives? I've noticed that PATA drives end at 750GB.

#6 - Do you have any plans for encrypted hard drives? In what form factor?

Which departments of Hitachi will answer the questions? Hard disc or optical storage? If the second, does it include the optical disc part (Hitachi-Maxell)?

To Hitachi-Maxell:
How do you comment the fact that some dvd recorder manufacturers overspeed some of your media?

While dvd recorder drive manufacturers have introduced 18x and 20x recording speed drives, we have not seen any media rated at these speeds. Why is this? Are there any 18x or 20x media in your plans?

Why isn't the disc's MID code printed at the package? Could this be done in the future, please?


To the drive design department:
Renesas based drives don't support 12x recording of DVD-R media. What causes it?

You use Renesas and Panasonic controller chips on your drive while the rest drive manufacturers use one brand only.
You release drives with almost identical specifications but one using Renesas and the other Panasonic chip. What is the reason?

Are there any thoughts on leaving Panasonic or Renesas?

Many people prefer buying laptops with LG optical drives, but most laptop brands don't provide any firmware updates. Why this happens? Is it because of you? Could you consider releasing firmwares in the feature for your laptop drives, please?

The LG clones of some of your drives eg H10/H12, use UDMA2, while Hitachi drives use UDMA4. What is the reason?

To all:
Do you visit forums about data storage, like cdfreaks?

I want to buy a plextor plexwriter PX-W2410 tu usb or other who do the same.
I want to burnt my own karaoke songs and I need a new drives who do this thing. thank you
jg382002@yahoo.ca 17 fev2008