How much space do 400 hours¹ of digital video need? About 7-cubed inches if you get Western Digital’s new storage box with 4-terabytes of capacity.
Announced today from the Lake Forest hard drive company, the WD ShareSpace is also fast — with transfer speeds of up to one gigabit per second when connected to a gigabit-Ethernet network. Translation: It’ll take 37.6 seconds to transfer a loaded DVD to the drive (ideal conditions, of course).
The system stands out because of a few features: It has WD’s GreenPower, so it uses up to 33 percent less power than other systems.
And you can add up to four desktop hard drives so if the current storage fills up, just take out the full drive and slide a new one in. And when drives get larger, it will accept the bigger sizes.
However, Western Digital says that if you add a non-WD hard drive to the case, it won’t work. There are software issues, says the company.
Such drive enclosures aren’t new for the industry — D-Link and Netgear have offered one for years — but this is rare for a Western Digital Product.
Lots of details on WD ShareSpace features and specs HERE.
The 2 TB version is $699.99, the 4 TB is $999.99. Both are available but the 4 TB is sold out at Western Digital’s online store. It should be available next week.
1. From WD’s site: The DV format, regardless of its mode (miniDV, DVCAM, DVC-Pro) has a data rate of approximately 25mb/s (mega-bits per second). In storage terms, this translates to approximately 3.5MB/s (Megabytes per second) or 13GB/hr (Gigabytes per hour)
Images from Western Digital
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Tamara 'the Gadgetress' Chuang
I meant “drive agnostic”. Oops.
I think the Drobo is a better option for storage. It is drive agnosting and provides data redundancy. Although the WD drive kicks the Drobo’s butt in network connectivity….