Hitachi GD-5000 DVD Drive (1999)

The GD-5000 is the fifth-generation DVD-ROM drive from Hitachi. It can be identified as one of the world’s leading manufacturers of both read-only and rewritable DVD drives for use in desktop computer and storage library products. It was one of the fastest DVD-ROM drive available in 1999, with data transfer rates up to 11.08 Megabytes (MB) per second for DVD-ROM and 6.0 MB/s (40X Max) for CD-ROM, and enhanced data access times for all types of media. It has full read compatibility for all types of industry-standard pre-recorded and recordable media. DVD-ROM drive is a powerful tool for individuals and enterprises to share data of all types and also it is Hitachi’s latest generation. GD-5000 enables access to Data recorded on legacy CDs and standard rewritable DVD media formats on a single, affordable drive.

The GD-5000 can read pressed discs and recorded data on the following types of media.

• DVD-RAM (rewritable) and DVD-R (recordable) single-sided media.
• Single- and multi-layer DVD-ROM and DVD-Video. To view video content, user systems must have either software or hardware-supported MPEG-2 decoding capability.
• All pre-recorded and writable CDs, including CD-ROM, CD-R/RW, PhotoCD, Audio, and Video CD.

It has a combination of flexibility and industry-leading performance. With that combination, Hitachi expects that the GD-5000 will be widely used by OEMs, integrators, and resellers serving computer end-users. The drive is using the personal computer industry-standard IDE/ATAPI bus interface, and it supports burst transfer rates of 33.3 MB/s (Ultra DMA Mode 2) and 16.6 MB/s (PIO Mode 4). In addition to its fast (8X) data transfer rate, the GD-5000 has typical data access rates of 120 ms when reading DVD media, and 90 ms when reading CD media. When reading DVD-RAM media, the data transfer rate is 1.38 MB/s.