One day after it was spotted for sale at Best Buy, Western Digital officially introduced its second-generation WD TV Live HD Media Player. The device is capable of playing back full 1080p videos from attached thumb or external drives, as well as networked computers, on an HDTV.
Western Digital has updated its WD TV Live Media Player by releasing its successor. Like the original, the new player has a USB 2.0 slot for thumb drives, external drives or PCs, along with an HDMI port to connect it to TVs. New features include DLNA and Bonjour support, letting users access their home networks and stream multimedia via the Ethernet port.
Western Digital this morning started up a new grade of external hard drive for both its desktop and portable lines. The My Book Elite, My Book Studio and My Passport Elite both now have added visual details as to their in-use storage; while the My Passport's basic gauge is new in the first place, the new My Books get an e-paper display that shows the exact space free and the drive name even when the disk isn't plugged in. Every model comes with Time Machine-like continuous backup software as well as the option of 256-bit hardware encryption.
Hard drive maker Western Digital has launched five new external hard drives, all incorporating automatic backup software, password protection and 256-bit hardware encryption along with a physical redesign. The additions include three portable My Passport drives, including the My Passport Essential, My Passport Essential SE, and My Passport for Mac, along with two new desktop My Book models, the My Book Essential and My Book for Mac. All will include WD's new backup software, SmartWare, which is compatible with both Macs and PCs and is meant to be simpler, thanks to an easily understood visual interface. There is also a search function and real-time backup status information.
Western Digital this morning began shipping the 640GB Scorpio Blue, one of the first drives above 500GB to fit in most notebooks. It uses two 320GB platters to reach its capacity while still measuring 9.5mm thick and thus thin enough to fit in particularly slim portables like the MacBook Pro. As a Blue series drive, it's aimed at the mainstream and spins at 5,400RPM with an 8MB cache.
Western Digital this morning at last unveiled its first 2TB hard drives intended for performance. The 2TB Caviar Black and the business-oriented RE4 spin at a full 7,200RPM but also have features rarely seen even at this end of hard disk technology: both have 64MB of cache, dual processors and dual actuators to move the drive head into position faster. It's hoped the extra features offset the potential slowdown from having to seek across four 500GB platters.
Fujitsu's Celsius Ultra gaming PC, which is claimed to be the fastest air-cooled gaming system around, has been priced and images have been captured, as it has been tested by an independent source. The 3.33GHz Intel Core i7-powered system sports dual EVGA GeForce GTX 295 graphics cards set up in a 4-way SLI configuration on a single board. Each card has 1.8GB of dedicated RMA. The cards' cooling capabilities haven't been modified, though their speeds have been slightly increased. There is also 12GB of RAM onboard.
Western Digital shrunk its media hub today and produced the WD TV Mini, a new extra-small version of its earlier media sharing device. The set-top box omits HDMI output but now measures just 3.6 inches square and 0.8 inches deep while still capable of playing 1080i video depending on the codec. RealVideo format support is equally new and complements the existing MPEG-1/2/4, VOB and XviD formats.
Advances in TDK's hard drive technology could lead to another large boost in the capacity of hard drives within a few months, a roadmap presented this week shows. The storage firm is currently going through qualification tests of 640GB drive platters that would fit into a typical 3.5-inch drive and so would allow significantly more storage than existing 2TB drives from Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital. A premium but commonplace four-platter drive could hold just over 2.5TB of data.
Western Digital has introduced new, 750GB and 1TB portable USB drives as a part of the My Passport Essential SE line. Models are approximately the same weight as their counterparts in the My Passport Elite series, but slightly larger. The SEs are USB-powered, and on Windows systems equipped with sync software and 128-bit encryption. A titanium silver finish decorates the outside of what are effectively external versions of WD's new notebook drives.
Western Digital today reached a symbolic milestone in notebook storage today by launching two new Scorpio Blue notebook hard drives above the 500GB mark. The new versions reach 750GB and 1TB each by fitting just over 333GB per platter. While the drives are 12.5mm tall and therefore unlikely to fit most notebooks outside of desktop replacement models, the design both points to the future and is deemed particularly useful for external drives, where the extra space is more valuable.
Demand for notebook hard drives should lead to a shortage of disks throughout much of the summer, integrated circuit producers GMI Technology and Weikeng Industrial warned on Friday. As sales agents for hard drives from Hitachi, Toshiba and Western Digital, they tell DigiTimes that their clients hadn't anticipated demand and didn't adjust until it was too late. Hitachi and Western Digital were fiscally conservative due to the economy and didn't expand until early spring, while Toshiba is simply seeing very high demand for a single-platter 250GB drive.
WD on Wednesday announced the launch of its redesigned My Book World Edition II dual-drive network storage system (NAS). Available in 2TB and 4TB capacities, the dual-drive systems ship set up in a mirrored (RAID 1) drive array, backing up data simultaneously to both drives, making it safe in case one fails. WD also includes backup software meant to make scheduling automatic data backup easier for inexperienced Windows PC users.
Western Digital has already tipped its hand as to a capacity boost for its Caviar Black line with promo material from Japan. Local retailer SofMap has been given personal cleaning kits that indicate a 2TB Caviar Black is due in the near future and would be the first mainstream hard drive to come with 64MB of cache to speed up disk access. To date, the performance-oriented models have been limited to 1TB of space and 32MB of cache; Western Digital already offers a 2TB Caviar Green but, until now, hasn't had the option of a full-speed drive.
Western Digital this morning entered into the solid-state drive field in earnest and launched its SiliconDrive III range. The result of its buyout of SiliconSystems earlier this year, the drives are targeted at professionals where longevity is more important than sheer speed. Although they don't have read and write speeds faster than 100MB and 80MB per second respectively, they have a unique predictive feature that calculates the remaining lifespan of a drive so that it can be replaced before it fails.
Western Digital on Tuesday launched one of its largest home drives with an upgrade to the My Book Studio Edition II: the new model pairs two 2TB drives together in a RAID 0 stripe for a total of 4TB of space, affording it enough room for very large backups or other media. As before, it comes pre-formatted in HFS+ for Macs and is seen as particularly useful for large Time Machine backups.
Western Digital this morning grabbed an edge against rival Seagate by acquiring flash storage maker SiliconSystems for $65 million. The deal takes effect almost immediately and will set the new division towards producing solid-state drives (SSDs) for its parent. No immediate product plans have been announced, but SiliconSystems currently makes SSDs for notebook-friendly 2.5-inch sizes and smaller, including 1.8-inch and memory card-sized drives.
Maingear on Thursday hoped to add a unique feature to small-but-fast notebooks by launching the mX-L. The 13.3-inch platform is rare among factory-built notebooks in its option for a custom laser engraving on the back that personalizes its look. The system is also still rare for its size in having the choice of up to a 2.93GHz Core 2 Duo for its processor and storage that scales up to either Intel's 160GB X25-M solid-state drive or a traditional 500GB Western Digital rotating disk. Custom orders can similarly outfit it with up to 8GB of RAM.
Western Digital today gave all of its single-disk My Book external hard drives new 2TB capacity levels. The upgrade is equivalent to about 241 hours of full-bitrate HD and is particularly described as useful for Mac users or frequent shoppers from iTunes. At least 250 million TV shows have been bought, according to data from Apple, while over 33 million movies have either been rented or bought outright.
Western Digital has announced an upgrade to its WD ShareSpace four-bay storage system, resulting in an increased storage capacity from 4TB up to 8TB. The enhanced storage is made possible by incorporating 2TB Cavier Green drives. In addition to the larger capacity, the new version is also designed to improve the system’s read and write speeds by up to 30 percent for large media files, and includes a DLNA certified media server to help with streaming music, photos, and videos to popular DLNA-certified devices such as the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.
Other World Computing has released a number of new Voyager hard-drive docking bundles, with storage capacities up to 2.0TB and dual-interface or quad-interface options. The external Voyager S2 features USB 2.0 and eSATA connection options, with support for both Windows and Mac systems. Customers can choose between a 500GB or 1.0TB Hitachi Deskstar drive, 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda drive, or a 2.0TB Western Digital Caviar Green drive.
Western Digital on Wednesday introduced new My Book World Edition network storage drives in 1TB and new 2TB capacities that can automatically back up the files on multiple network-connected PCs and/or Macs. The drives have can be quickly setup by plugging them into a network router and setting them up to back up files via a relatively straightforward interface. Any changes to selected files on the connected and synced computers is then automatically saved at user-set intervals.
Today's deals at DealNN include a variety of deals on electronics from iPods to external hard drives. Most notable today is the Western Digital My Passport Studio external hard drive. This hard drive is pre-formatted for Mac users and offers FireWire, and USB interface options. It is currently priced at $99.99, which is a price reduction of $55 off the original price of $154.99, and includes FREE shipping after mail in rebate from MacMall.
As promised, Western Digital today launched the Caviar Green 2TB, the world's first desktop hard drive to cross the 2TB milestone. The 3.5-inch SATA drive takes advantage of the 500GB per platter technology behind its 1.5TB drive to reach the record capacity but uses intelligent seek patterns and on-the-fly changes to spin speed, reducing the amount of power used in certain loading situations or in low demand.
Toshiba on Wednesday revealed (reg. required) that talks are currently underway to investigate buying Fujitsu's hard drive business in a deal estimated to be worth roughly $448.8 million. No details have been revealed, but Fujitsu itself has acknowledged the talks and says that Toshiba is one of "several" candidates for a possible deal, which in the past have also included Western Digital.
Western Digital is on the verge of launching a record-setting hard drive, according to a tip sent to Fudzilla. Corroborated by a store listing, the leak hints at a Caviar Green model, the WD20EADS, that should top 2TB using and double the capacity of the drive maker's current line. The Green label will be earned through a power-efficient design that winds down to 5,400RPM from the normal 7,200RPM under lower demand.
Hard drive manufacturers are in the midst of developing 2.5-inch hard drives inexpensive enough to easily be used with netbooks and other budget notebooks, say unnamed storagy industry contacts. Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital at a minimum are all said to be developing drives that would cost between 40 and 50 percent less than many existing netbook drives, which cost up to $45 and take up a disproportionately large percentage of the final cost of systems that themselves often cost approximately $400.
In time for Thanksgiving, Data Robotics today started offering a $50 holiday discount in the form of an instant $50 coupon for the driveless model of its of its Drobo storage robot as well as the preloaded 2TB and 4TB versions. This comes in addition to recent, permanent price cuts to the 2TB and 4TB Drobo. As before, all offer a hot-swappable drive functionality that lets users keep a perpetually upgradable redundant backup by adding or replacing SATA drives of any capacity that automatically merge their storage existing content.
Micron has developed an extremely fast solid-state drive that could set new records for internal storage and shown the drive in an early test. The claimed new breakthrough in storage uses two SSDs with 16 data channels for the flash memory to generate a total transfer speed of 1GB per second. The performance tops 200,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) and is quick enough that Micron has to drop Serial ATA II's 300MB per second bandwidth cap in favor of PCI Express.
Western Digital on Monday took its own turn at media hubs by introducing the HD TV Media Player. In place of using a network connection, the company is taking advantage of its skill with external storage to let users locally transfer content: users can attach up to two USB hard drives, certain portable media players or other devices (including the company's MyBook drives) and browse the contents of the drive with an on-screen menu and a bundled remote.
Western Digital released a new My Passport Studio portable drive with a high-speed FireWire 800 interface. The drive ships pre-formatted with HFS+ and includes high-speed turbo drivers for use with Mac computers, and is capable of working directly with the recently introduced Apple MacBook Pro as well as desktops equipped with the faster port. Other connection options include FireWire 400 and USB for owners connecting to legacy machines.
Fujitsu and Western Digital are allegedly in conversation over the purchase of Fujitsu's hard drive business sector, an inside source tells Reuters. Despite fierce denial on Fujitsu's part, the news sent the company's share price shooting up 3.3 percent on the Nikkei market to ¥620 (~$5.80), since Fujitsu's hard drive unit is currently losing money. The sale talks come as Fujitsu faces increased competition from Seagate and others, as well as plummeting storage prices.
Server, notebook and desktop and gaming PC maker Visionman on Wednesday introduced a new water-cooled gaming PC to its comprehensive range of gaming PCs, with the Widow Red Blizzard. The latest PC runs a dual-core Intel 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo, which gets cooling from a quiet liquid CPU cooling system that, Visionman is quick to point out, lends itself well to overclocking the CPU. As such, there is also no need for a noisy fan and heatsink combination. The system also includes 2GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive from Western Digital.
Continuing its hard drive updates from earlier in the week, Western Digital today has started shipping the next wave of its Caviar Green eco-friendly drives. The upgrades use a smarter seek algorithm and aggressive caching to drop power use by about 20 percent versus the company's regular hard disks. This next update is also about 10 percent faster than earlier Green drives, according to the company's claims, and uses new storage that carries as much as 333GB per platter on the drive as well as 32MB of cache for every model.
Western Digital today leapt into more serious home and SoHo network-attached storage with the appearance of its ShareSpace line. The four-bay system is designed to be simple, with a built-in iTunes server for sharing content over the network and pre-supplied backup software, but is also more powerful than the company's normal home drives. All ShareSpace boxes can run in either a RAID stripe for sheer space or a mirror for simple redundancy; a top-end model with all four bays full can also run in RAID 5 for a combination of backup and striping that makes the most of the available storage.
Western Digital on Monday introduced a 500GB capacity portable drive in its My Passport Elite and My Passport Essential lines. The small drives are small and light enough at seven ounces to be carried comfortably in users’ pockets and connect to computers via a USB 2.0 port. They feature built-in 128-bit encryption for security and are compatible with gaming consoles such as Sony’s PlayStation3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 for added flexibility in loading music or videos.
Western Digital on Friday began shipping the 500GB Scorpio Blue, the company's largest-capacity notebook drive. Claiming a record in the process, Western Digital says the disk is the only one to make no sacrifices in size or speed to reach its storage goal. The Serial ATA drive is as tall as normal notebook hard drives at 9.5mm (0.37in) and spins at the same 5,400RPM as most other 2.5-inch disks. Quietness is also considered paramount with an optimized seeking process cutting down on the noise generated by the drive head.
Western Digital on Tuesday announced it has began shipping its previously announced VelociRaptor hard drive with a 300GB capacity. While the drive itself is a 2.5-inch unit, it is encased in a 3.5-inch frame that acts as a heatsink for the 10,000RPM disk. WD claims its newest, backplane-compatible Velociraptor offers twice the storage capacity and a third faster performance than the Raptor drives it replaces while running at a lower temperature.
Western Digital is today expanding its MyBook line with its first truly redundant backup drive. Instead of simply using additional drives for extra capacity, the MyBook Mirror Edition comes out of the box set up in a RAID 1 mirror that automatically backs up one drive's information on the second. The layout can be used either to rely solely on an external drive for certain data or to add a second layer to an existing backup. The casing is accessible and lets users swap out the drives either to replace a damaged drive or to swap both drives in the future.
Western Digital hopes today to ramp up the speed of high-end pro and gaming desktops with new Caviar Black desktop drives. The 3.5-inch drive comes in 750GB and 1TB storage levels like many others but includes dual processors as well as 32MB of cache that are said to speed up moving data on the drives. This added edge could be crucial for video editors and others who depend on short load times, the company says. A locked-down motor shaft and a read head that never touches the drive platters both keep the drive quiet and also reduce the physical wear on the disk.
Western Digital is in the early stages of developing the first hard drive to spin at 20,000RPM, alleged sources have told Bit-Tech. Fears that solid-state drives may overtake its business have led the company to develop a record-setting hard drive that will share the same design philosophy as the VelociRaptor; the hard drive itself will measure 2.5 inches across but sit in a 3.5-inch enclosure that both cools the disk and cuts down on noise.
Western Digital started the week by shipping the 320GB Scorpio Black, its largest-capacity high-speed drive. The 2.5-inch Serial ATA drive enters the increasingly competitive arena of performance notebook drives and includes specs that are normally reserved for desktop drives, including a 7,200RPM spin rate and 16MB of cache to reduce the need for disk access. It also touts measures to protect against damage from the read head; a safe parking technique avoids damage when the drive is switched off, while the more common addition of a free-fall sensor keeps the head away from the magnetic surface in the event of a drop.
Western Digital has introduced a new line of portable hard drives for Macs, the My Passport Studios. The drives are specifically journaled and HFS+-formatted for Macs, and are compatible with Apple's Time Machine utility in Mac OS X Leopard; they are likewise equipped with a FireWire 400 port, in addition to a more standard USB 2.0 connection. A rounded silver case is intended to blend in with other Mac hardware.
Computer makers could soon find themselves without enough supply of notebook hard drives to meet demand, according to reports from those inside the storage business in the Taiwan area. The spiking popularity of micro notebooks with 1.8-inch drives, such as the Eee PC 900, is said to be having a ripple effect on stocks larger 2.5-inch disks. As these major producers haven't increased their production to match, they may be unable to supply system builders with enough drives to meet typically high demand during the summer quarter, the reputed sources say.
Western Digital on Thursday released its My DVR Expander External Hard Drive USB Edition made to work with DISH Network ViP-series HD DVRs to more than double their recording capacity. The 500GB drive is capable of storing up to 60 hours of HD programming or 300 hours in standard definition. The drives connect to the DVRs via a USB 2.0 connection, unlike WD's previous Expander, which featured an eSATA interface.
Gateway this morning revamped the core of its desktop line to take advantage of newer processors. The FX7026 and the higher-end FX541 series replace earlier models in Gateway's gaming line and all focus on quad-core as well as fast 3D. The base FX7026 starts off with a 2.5GHz Core 2 Quad, 4GB of RAM, and a factory-overclocked GeForce 8800 GT for video. It also includes Western Digital's new 640GB Caviar drive at its $1,100 price point. The FX541 series adds an SLI-capable mainboard with two GPU slots; a stock $1,200 model is similar to its lower-end sibling, while the FX541XT at the very high end includes an overclocked but unnamed CPU as well as dual GeForce 8800 GT cards and other features for $3,500.
Western Digital says it has blurred the lines between drive classes with the release of the VelociRaptor, the latest generation of its Raptor high-speed hard disks. The 300GB drive is targeted as much at enthusiasts as professionals and holds twice as much as the most recent Raptor while outperforming it: while spinning at the same 10,000RPM, the VelociRaptor benchmarks about 35 percent faster, the company claims.
Western Digital on Wednesday introduced its My Book Studio Edition II external dual-drive storage systems. Available with capacities of either 1TB or 2TB, the drives are formatted for Mac computers, but also come with software to make them Windows compatible. Both drives share four interface options, ranging from eSATA and FireWire 800 to FireWire 400 and USB 2.0. Each drive is meant for speed-intensive activities such as video editing, and as such default to a striped RAID 0 configuration; either model can however be configured for a RAID 1 mirrored setup, as necessary.
Hard drive maker Western Digital has announced a new line of external USB drives, the My Passport Elites. The drives weigh less than 5oz, and are in theory small enough to fit in a pocket; they are nevertheless entirely USB powered, and are available in 250 and 320GB capacities. Like some other WD drives an external gauge shows how much space is left, and files are safeguarded using 128-bit encryption. Automatic backup software is included.
Western Digital on Wednesday said it had started shipping its 640GB Caviar SE16. The 3.5-inch desktop drive stores less than the 750GB and 1TB drives that have reached shelves but achieves its 640GB capacity using only two platters. With such sheer density, the drive is both faster than some other drives and also runs at cooler (and thus quieter) levels than disks which would need three or even four platters to push past the 500GB mark, according to the company.
