Data storage gets image makeover

Amid the sea of sleek new cell phones and eye-catching high-definition televisions, a typically hidden and humbler technology is preparing to make its biggest splash yet at the world’s largest annual consumer technology show.

In fact, the bold new marketing will begin right at the Las Vegas airport. A giant sculpture built from thousands of photographs will greet visitors arriving for next week’s International Consumer Electronics Show: “When you lose your files, you lose a part of yourself.”

It’s part of a larger plan by Seagate Technology LLC, the world’s top maker of hard disk drives, to convince consumers that safekeeping digital data is now an important aspect of their everyday lives.

Hard drives and their growing storage capacities are gaining importance as vaults for digital media as people increasingly stuff digital video recorders with favorite TV programs, audio players with digital music and computers with photo memories.

Other companies are also trying to convey the same message, selling storage products and services to cater to the mushrooming personal digital collections.

Hitachi will debut the industry’s first terabyte hard drive, selling it for $400 by March as an add-on for computers.

It will also produce a version that could be built into digital video recorders such as those from TiVo Inc. and rivals.

A terabyte can hold the text of roughly 1 million books; 1,000 hours of standard-definition video; 250 hours of high-definition video; or a quarter million songs — that’s two year’s of music without hearing the same song twice, according to Hitachi.

It would be the largest-capacity drive today.

“The ease with which we’re creating data today, whether it’s e-books, music, video or text, means there will be a digital home … and storage will be at the center of it,” said Doug Pickford, a director of market and product strategy for Hitachi’s storage division.