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Western Digital adds 140-600 hours to TiVo, DVRs

April 22nd, 2009, 8:00 pm by

Western Digital's My DVR ExpanderJust a quick note: Western Digital in Lake Forest added a 1-terabyte drive to its line of “My DVR Expander” products.  It’s an external hard drive that plugs in to a TiVo or other compatible digital video recorder and immediately adds room for up to 140 more hours of high-definition TV shows and movies. That also translates to about 600 more hours of standard definition. Nice! 

The latest model works with TiVo Series 3 and TiVo HD DVRs, using an eSATA connection. Price: $199.99 and available at shopwd.com.

Unfortunately, My Expander doesn’t work with every brand of DVR, especially if the DVR is from the cable company. But according to Western Digital, it’s “been tested for compatibility with Scientific Atlanta 8300 Series, and has been TiVo verified compatible with TiVo Series3 and TiVo HD DVRs.” 

An older 500-gigabyte model with USB connections is also available. That one appears to work with DISH Network’s ViP Series HD DVRs, according to the company.

More TV: Check out the Gadgetress Guide to local TV services. Latest DVR headlines:

Posted in: Storage • Video & TV • • • • • • • | 3 Comments »

Western Digital launches first 2 TB drive

January 27th, 2009, 8:02 am by

Way back when, Western Digital followed the competition and took forever to get to a 1 Terabyte drive in 2007. Today, the Lake Forest company introduced the industry’s first 2 TB hard drive.

The new desktop computer hard drive crammed 500/GB per platter in the 4-platter drive. (Other details: It has 32 MB cache, 400 Gigabits/square inch in aerial density and it’s one of the company’s Eco drives, which uses less power than traditional drives.)  

Who really needs this much space (besides myself)? The company points to Trend Focus, a market research firm that covers the storage space. Its president, Mark Geenan, says that while some wondered if consumers would buy a 1 TB drive, 10 percent of the 3.5-inch hard drives sales are 1 TB or higher. 

And, according to WD’s handy “What it holds” chart, I think we could easily run out of space if it only holds 240 hours of high-definition video: 

Up to 571,000 digital photos
Up to 500,000 songs (MP3)
Up to 50,000 songs (uncompressed CD quality)
Up to 150 hours of Digital Video (DV)
Up to 880 hours of DVD quality video
Up to 240 hours of HD video

The new WD Caviar Green 2 TB drive (model WD20EADS) is now available at a suggested price of $299, which makes it a budget-worthy 15-cents per gigabyte!

Read a preliminary review of the new drive at HotHardware.com: “WD 2TB Caviar Green Monster Drive Preview.”

Past Western Digital stories: 

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When a PC crashes, CMS’ BounceBack to the rescue

January 12th, 2009, 10:16 am by

The show ended Sunday. Here is the rest of what I saw at CES… To see more, visit Gadgetress@CES 2009

When a computer crashes, consumers bemoan the fact that they never backed up their photos, music and other valuable documents. No more!

CMS Products, based in Costa Mesa, announced a new fix at CES: Its “BounceBack Ultimate” software runs even if you don’t have a hard drive inside your computer. The company demoed the new software at CES by popping out a laptop’s hard drive and placing it on top so the computer was obviously running on the external drive:

Apparently, booting up a computer from a USB hard drive is difficult. CMS says this product is the first “commercially-available software product that enables computer users to instantly recover their PC following a hard drive ‘crash.’” The software stores (and backs up) all information on an external hard drive, which must be connected to the computer. The external drive can be from any company — not just CMS.

Whenever you restart your computer, it’ll ask whether you want to boot from the external drive or the computer.  If your computer suddenly stops working, a likely culprit could be a corrupt hard drive. So, select “external drive” when you boot up the computer, and you can begin the recovery process. The software will restore your computer’s hard drive to an earlier time when it was working properly. Also, make sure you have nothing on the external drive because BounceBack reformats the drive.

“BounceBack Ultimate” software is included with CMS’s external hard drives or you can purchase it for $99. It’s compatible with Windows XP. A Windows Vista version should be available in the next few weeks, according to the company. A trial version should be available. Check CMS’ site for details (the “Ultimate” version is not yet available on CMS’ web site, but here’s a link to BouceBack Pro). 

For the list of Gadgetress reports from CES, visit the headline page at gadgetress.freedomblogging.com/ces2009.

Posted in: Storage • • • • • • • • • | 7 Comments »

USB gets faster, SD gets bigger

January 12th, 2009, 8:23 am by

The show ended Sunday. Here is beginning of the rest of what I saw at CES… For the list of Gadgetress reports from CES, visit the headline page at Gadgetress@CES 2009

The pervasive USB technology suits many just fine. But it’s still not that fast, especially if you’re trying to transfer large files from an external hard drive to PC, or vice versa.

A speed boost is pending, thanks the the next-generation USB standard getting approval in November. USB 3.0, also dubbed SuperSpeed USB, will reach speeds of 5 gigabits-per second — a steep increase from today’s USB 2.0 standard, which is around 480 mbps.

Translation: a file that takes 27 minutes to transfer from an external hard drive to PC using today’s USB High-Speed technology will take 60 to 70 seconds on USB 3.0′s Super-Speed technology. 

According to the USB association, which was present at CES, consumers could start seeing USB 3.0 products by early 2010.

SD-memory cards get bigger

Separately, the tiny flash-memory cards we call MicroSD just got a capacity boost, also thanks to the passing of a new engineering standard. Being  called “SDXC,” the new cards will reach 32 GB to 2 terabyte capacities by 2010. The read and write speeds also get a boost — up to 104 Megabytres per second this year and 300 MBps in years to come.

The good news is that the new standard won’t require consumers to get new card readers, as we all did in order to read SD cards over 2 GBs. And the industry is, of course, bringing the larger capacity cards to the teeny-tiny microSD format as well. Just think… 2 TB of storage on your cell phone. That’s equivelant to a total 136,000 photos in fine mode, or 480 hours of HD video or an assortment of files, as pictured below!

For the list of Gadgetress reports from CES, visit the headline page at gadgetress.freedomblogging.com/ces2009.

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Toshiba unveils largest flash-memory drive

January 10th, 2009, 11:15 am by

For what’s next in computer storage, look no further than Toshiba Corp., which showed prototypes of 512 GB solid state drives during the Consumer Electronics Show (click image to view larger):

The solid-state technology is the same stuff inside tiny SD and other flash cards used in cell phones, digital cameras and MP3 players.

Toshiba’s new storage sizes are available in 2.5-inch drives, which are sizes found in laptops like the Apple’s svelte MacBook Air, currently at a mere 120 GB. The drives are thinner, lighter and more reliable because they have no moving parts, unlike traditional computer hard drives which rely on spinning platters to store and read data.

Other capacities include 64 GB, 128 GB and 256 GB, which are available in 1.8-inch or 2.5-inch sizes. Speeds are up to a maximum sequential read speed of 240 MB per second, and a write speed of 200 MBps. The new drives will be available during the first quarter of 2009, with mass production beginning around April.

Toshiba’s U.S. storage division is based in Irvine.

To see headlines from earlier stories from CES, please visit gadgetress.freedomblogging.com/ces2009.

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Kingston (yes, the PC memory co.) starts free mobile games offer

December 19th, 2008, 7:08 am by

While we weren’t paying attention (at least your’s truly), Kingston Technology Co. somehow became a player in the cell phone industry.

The Fountain Valley computer memory company (as in internal PC DRAM memory) found an in through the tiny flash-memory cards used by a growing number of cell phones everywhere. This week, it jumped into the mobile game market, thanks to a partnership with Movaya, a Seattle distributor of mobile software. Consumers who drop by Kingston’s Mobile Phone Village site can request a free game every day. 

Today, it’s “David Coulthard GP,” a racing game with Scottish Formula 1 racing driver.

Okay, it’s not really free. It’s a limited trial, good for about 5 minutes of game play. If you really want to see what else is out there, then go to the main site, at BustedThumbs.com, which has a bunch of games available for a limited free trial.

Still, it’s always nice to try before you buy. And in this case, you just enter your phone number and the game will be sent directly to your phone.

Kingston launched Mobile Phone Village back in June 2006, according to public relations manager David Leong. Since then, the company has done a bunch of partnerships, like one featuring musician Ricky Martin, another with free college ringtones, and its ongoing free-music download of the day with eMusic.com.

“The mobile space is growing by leaps and bounds for us,” he said. “…At one point, we were shipping out more 1GB microSD cards than anything else, including DRAM! Mobile is still a hot commodity and one of the largest growth areas for us going into 2009.”

So, if you’re not into games, you should stop by for the free song each day. There’s no catch either. Just go to the Kingston site and download the MP3 file straight to your PC.  Today’s track: Beethoven: Mass In C – Sir Colin Davis.

Free game reports from around the web:

Recent deals posts from Gadgetress:

Posted in: Cell phones • Storage • • • • • • • | 1 Comment »

Western Digital offers way to watch PC’s HD movies on TV

November 3rd, 2008, 8:25 am by

Problem: Lots of high-def videos and movies stored on your home computer or external hard drive but no simple way to play them on the big TV in the living room. 

Answer: The Western Digital WD TV Media Player. The Lake Forest hard drive maker just announced its new gadget that stays connected to the TV. When you want to play video files from a hard drive, just plug in the hard drive to the Media player, select the file and hit play — up to two USB drives at a time. 

This sounds much neater than wiring up a laptop to the TV for that cluttered home electronics look. But then again, it’s not perfect. It’s not a networked gadget so you’ll need to transfer all those PC video files to a hard drive instead of trying to access the files on your home network. And too bad it’s not wireless. It appears to be much like many other media players that have been on the market for years, but this one allows you to plug in a hard drive or two. Plus, it’s HD — up to 1080p resolution. 

The system comes with a remote control and will let users watch photo slideshows and listen to music too. It also comes with ArcSoft MediaConverter 2.5 to convert photos, video and music into formats optimized for the WD TV HD Media player. It’s available now at shopwd.com for $129.99.

Posted in: Storage • Video & TV • • • • • | Comments Off

Western Digital adds build-your-own storage

September 30th, 2008, 11:27 am by

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

Related posts:

Posted in: Storage • • • • | 2 Comments »

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