Hizzitachi

Hitachi really made a splash with their “Hard Drive is the New Bling” promotion, or contest, or campaign, or practical joke, or whatever it is. We all had a good laugh and the writers of Engadget swore off the word “bling” forevermore. But the tin-eared marketing pales next to the sheer wrongness underneath.

The pitch wasn’t really about bling at all, or even geek bling. I imagine what it said before Cory Coolhunter in Marketing got hold of it was, “We should tell everybody that the best portable electronic devices use Hitachi microdrives.” I think in the end that will prove to have been briefly true. But microdrives are on the way out. They have no inherent advantages over flash (that I know of), so they only exist at a particular size tier as long as flash memory at that tier is significantly more expensive. This is surely obvious to everyone, except maybe to Hitachi – who don’t seem to make flash memory devices.

A 2GB CF card is now cheaper than a 2GB microdrive in CF form and the gap is narrowing at the 4GB level as well. The iPod mini and its hard drive storage are out; the iPod nano and its flash memory storage are in. Samsung has announced a 32GB flash memory chip that will enter production next year, and is aiming to start replacing notebook hard drives with flash memory as well. Meanwhile, Hitachi’s making jewelry.