You better overnight Santa an addendum to your Christmas list. You’re going to want to acquire as many hard drives as possible before 2012 rolls around. Both Seagate and Western Digital are slashing hard drive warrants for hard drives shipped next year. Tell Santa, tell your mother-in-law, tell you boss. All you want for Christmas this year are hard drives. → Read More
The recent floods in Thailand have wreaked devastation on the factories in the area; some were under a dozen feet or more of water, and all manner of companies were affected by the damage. Nikon and Samsung delayed cameras and a shortage of hard drives has caused a spike in prices.
The recovery effort is progressing apace, and the affected areas are being pumped or drained clear of water. Power was restored in the last week in some areas and Western Digital has just turned the lights back on at one of its factories there. → Read More
Western Digital is now shipping a new hard drive and you’re going to love it. The Scorpio Blue is a 2.5-inch 5,400rpm drive that manages to store 1TB of data over just two platters.
That means, unlike previous 2.5-inch 1TB drives, this boy will fit into any standard notebook. The old version spanned 1TB of data over three platters, resulting in a 12.5mm thick casing, which was perfect for small external storage drives but not so much for notebooks. The new one is only 9.5mm thick. → Read More
Western Digital, like most storage companies, has long had a line of products designed for the Mac crowd. The latest incarnation of the My Book Studio takes up a notch with a brushed aluminum enclouser and perforated top grill — you know, just like the Mac Pro. Also like the Mac Pro, this Apple-ified Firewire/USB 2.0 drive carries a premium with the 1TB, 2TB and 3TB drives costing $150, $200 and $250, respectively. Got to pay to play, I guess. [WD] → Read More
External hard drives are notoriously fragile devices. They do, after all, contain what is essentially a miniaturized multilayer record player. It’s in this spirit that Western Digital just announced the WD Nomad case for the My Passport External hard drive line. A elastomer interior holds the drive tight while a polycarbonate casing serves as the front line defense. Best of all the case has an included USB port so owners can still access the drive while it’s still protected. The WD Nomad is compatible with all the My Passport products and carries a $29.99 MSRP. → Read More
Today, Wester Digital announced an update to their WD TV Live devices to include Netflix 3.0 software along with the addition of CinemaNow. CinemaNow, operated by Best Buy, can access more than 10,000 movies and TV shows that users can either rent or purchase. The Netflix 3.0 update allows users to now search on the TV without having to set up queues on a PC. Also, the Netflix update includes support for movies with Dolby Digital Plus. → Read More
I’m pretty satisfied that we live in a world where A) I can order a pizza online and B) 3TB hard drives are only $150. What more could you want? The USB 3.0 Western Digital My Book Essential 3TB drive is on sale for $150 at Best Buy — no coupon code required. Just jump over to the site and order it up with free shipping. The Best Buy price is $30 less than Newegg or Amazon. Best Buy via DealNews → Read More
The latest My Book Studio Edition is a massive digital tome for storing your pics, music and spreadsheets. The model has always been a big boy, but the second edition ups the storage to a whooping 6TB and now supports Apple Time Machine backups. The backside houses FireWire 800/400, eSATA, and lowly USB 2.0. The $550 price tag is a bit much to swallow considering there’s various NAS solutions like Drobo that offer so much more functionality for the price, but hey, who I am to question how you spread data over six terabytes. → Read More
The storage arm of Hitachi, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, has been bought by Western Digital for a combination of cash and shares totaling $4.3 billion. It was just last year that WD surpassed Seagate in terms of hard drives shipped, but both companies are facing a challenge as consumer and local storage trends more towards high-speed flash, leaving spinning drives in their dust. → Read More
The Internet’s fav little media streamer just got a bunch of new notable features. Of course you already know what they are if you read the headline, but here it goes again: Facebook! AccuWeather! Deezer! and USB keyboard support meaning you can finally utilize a wireless keyboard feed through a wireless USB dongle to control your little streamer! All great selling points verse the similiarly priced Roku or Apple TV, but these features ride on the back of a major update for current owners. Nothing makes Jebus smile more than when companies update aging product lines with new features. Maybe baby squirrels… → Read More
The WD TV has long been atop the enthusiast’s list of favorite media streamers thanks to its low price and robust media format support. But the just-announced WD TV Live Hub does things a bit different. While it still dances with local networks and USB drives, the Live Hub packs a 1TB hard drive for local storage. Nearly anything can be stored on this drive and triggers can be set up to automagically sync content from certain folders across your network to this drive for easier playback.
So now with the WD TV Live Hub, the media stream race just got a bit more interesting. There’s the updated Apple TV, Roku, this Western Digital option, and soon the Boxee box. You know what? Everyone is going to get at least a participation ribbon in this race. There’s more than enough of marketshare pie for everyone to get a healthy helping. → Read More
Western Digital outed a 3TB external hard drive under the My Book line just a few weeks ago, but now, the same 5400 RPM hard drive along with a slightly smaller 2.5TB version are available sans the enclosure. Both drives ship with an PCI-E Advanced Host Controller Interface Host Bus Adapter that will add operating system support for the large drives. Even with this card, the drive will not talk with Windows XP either as a boot or secondary drive and won’t boot the 32-bit versions of Windows Vista or 7.
This goes back to the days of DOS when the LBA (logcial block addressing) standard was developed and is the main reason why Seagate, despite releasing its 3TB external drive way back in June, hasn’t released the hard drive itself on the market just yet. It’s a fustercluck of compatibility, but apparently Western Digital feels the world is ready for these drives. Fine with us. We can read a compatibility chart. → Read More
Seagate has been pushing its 3TB-per-drive advantage ever since it put out the 3TB GoFlex back in late June. They used ‘em to put 12TB into a 4-drive NAS, and I think some of that love must have trickled down to make this little 1.5TB baby possible. But their nemesis, Western Digital, may catch up in the coming months, having just announced a 3TB drive of their own. → Read More
Thieves in Malaysia managed to drive off in a truck containing 10,800 Western Digital hard drives. Don’t expect to see the drives hit the market though, Malaysian police were able to identify the culprits, as they used to work at the warehouse the drives were stolen from. The Malaysian news site NST reports that the people driving the truck were in fact waved through security after being recognized by the guard on duty as employees. Apparently the guard hadn’t got the memo about the men being fired. [via HardOCP] → Read More
Western Digital has a fancy, new device, the Livewire Powerline AV Network Kit, that will extend the range of your network to anywhere there’s an electrical outlet. Sounds like HomePlug, right? That’s because it is! Funny how that works. → Read More
Not to be outdone, Western Digital just released the Live Plus HD Media Player with Netflix streaming. The $149 box will stream just about anything to any TV and includes a direct storage access system, allowing you to stream video right off of a hard drive. The device outputs 1080p video over HDMI 1.3. It also streams over Wi-Fi. Product Page → Read More
Seagate is no longer the reigning hard drive king. Western Digital edged-out Seagate in the first quarter of 2010 by shipping 51.1 million hard drives. → Read More
Five hundred and fifty eight million hard drives were shipped in 2009. Think about that for a moment. Five hundred and fifty eight million. Of those, 175.2 million (or 31.4%) carried the Seagate brand name while 165.2 million came from Western Digital. According to The Information Network, WD pulled ahead in the first quarter of 2010, selling 51.1 million hard drives compared to Seagate’s 50.3 million sold. I guess that’s big news, if you’re really into hard drives, or have strong brand loyalty to the drive in your computer. Me, I don’t care so much. → Read More
Just to help you spend your paycheck today, we’ve got another CrunchDeal for you. Let’s say you’re running out of space, so you don’t have enough room to download Left 4 Dead 2. No problem, Newegg.com is selling a Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB drive for $70. This is the SATA 3.0Gb/s version, with the 4kb physical sectors. That makes it perfect for Windows 7, but no so great for XP. You can still use it, but it’ll require WD’s Align application. It’s still a great deal at $70, particularly if you have something like a NAS. The Western Digital Caviar Green drives actually run a little cooler then most other models, so you shouldn’t run into thermal issues. [via Tech Report] → Read More
It’s like Christmas morning for PC enthusiasts today. Western Digital has released its SATA 3.0 (that’s a maximum transfer rate of 6.0 Gb/s, which translates to 768 MB/s) Velociraptor hard drives. The Velociraptor name basically means “OMG FAST!” when it comes to hard drives. The thing is, unlike the last time Western Digital released Velociraptor hard drives, two years ago, solid state drives are on the market, and they’re clearly faster than even the fastest traditional hard drive. Doesn’t matter: if you’re looking for absolute, top-of-the-line performance when it comes to traditional hard drives, it looks like these new Velociraptors are the way to go. → Read More
