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More than ever before, hard drive technology is being adopted by gadget manufacturers to cater to the ever-increasing need for multimedia storage on personal devices.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has developed a new storage management system called Audio-Visual Storage Manager (AVSM) for managing the multimedia files in digital video recording devices including set-top boxes (STBs) that utilize hard disk drives.

Hitachi’s latest software is designed to seamlessly manage the mix of high-definition video streaming and file operations including electronic program guides or background IPTV downloads.

AVSM technology reduces duty cycle by up to 60 percent and eliminates disk fragmentation, helping to extend the life of the hard drive and the host system, which in turn maximizes performance and durability of the HDD in STB/DVR applications.

The combination of a streaming file system and sophisticated I/O scheduler in AVSM technology enables hard drives to work “smarter.” It handles the multiple HDTV streams present in multi-room households and optimizes task scheduling to help maximize HDD performance.

Simply put, AVSM technology promotes:

Exceptional hard drive reliability and longer STB service life by lowering hard disk drive duty cycle and protecting file system integrity;
Improved QoS and highly-predictable performance in multi-stream STB applications through reduction of file system fragmentation and related performance degradation;
Easy integration with multi-vendor support, minimal system footprint and no additional hardware resource requirement on the STB.
The ability to manage up to 14 HDTV (19.3Mb/s) streams from one 3.5-inch HDD.

Read [Hitachi] via [BusinessWire]