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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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AT&T improves wireless coverage in Newport, Lake Forest

December 11th, 2008, 4:51 pm by

AT&T enhances wireless coverage in South Orange CountyAT&T Inc. announced new two new towers in its ongoing $300 million investment to make sure it has “More bars in more places,” like its marketing claim. The latest Orange County areas to get new cell towers are Newport Coast and Lake Forest.  

Both new towers should improve 3G cellular coverage for area residents and businesses. AT&T’s 3G network has download speeds between 700 to 1,700 kbps, and upload speeds between 500 to 1,200 kbps.

AT&T has added several new cell towers in Orange County this year. See below for past reports.

Related:

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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.

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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

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O.C. firms launch ‘Apple store’ of the airline industry

September 22nd, 2008, 2:09 pm by

Things to do on an iPhone: 3,780 and counting.

Things to do while strapped in your seat on an airplane? Hmm … Maybe a dozen?

The latter could change drastically if a new partnership by Lake Forest’s Panasonic Avionics Corp. and New York’s CoKinetic Systems Corp. takes off. The two companies are building an marketplace where airline passengers can order flowers, make dinner reservations or even find a date while on board for that night .

Kris Stevens, CoKinetic’s CEO, envisions this “apps store” to be like Apple’s popular iPhone apps store, which had 60 million downloads in the first month!

“Individual developers will be able to put their imaginations to work and that’s the part I find very exciting. You never know on the Internet. There’s a bunch of crazy people creating a bunch of cool stuff. We’re going to take this somewhere the airline industry has never been able to go before,” said Stevens, who has a growing team of 11 employees next door to Panasonic’s Orange County headquarters.

Currently, getting new software onto an airplane’s in-flight entertainment (IFE) console is a long and costly process. Developers must write in C++ programming language for the Linux operating system, and then go through a rigorous certification process with the Federal Aviation Administration to avoid another crash like the SwissAir Flight 111. Just testing software for the FAA can cost $20,000 or more. And it could be a year or longer before the software makes it to the IFE console.

But much easier is getting media, such as a movie or music, onto the plane because it’s just a content update. CoKinetic took this “content” idea and developed an XML-based platform called Airplay. It’s already  FAA approved and is used by airlines such as Virgin America, which allows passengers to use IFE to order food (see a video demo of Virgin’s Red in-flight entertainment console on YouTube). New software apps are considered content and can be quickly added without government scrutiny.

Developers who know XML and JavaScript can develop new applications that will work with Airplay. CoKinetic and Panasonic will take care of the busy work, such as billing, distribution and integration with Airplay.

“This concept (of a marketplace) doesn’t exist right now,” said Stevens, who’s been working on the project with Panasonic for three years. Read the rest of this entry »

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Western Digital reaches 1 TB!

July 23rd, 2007, 12:11 pm by

Western Digital’s first 1 TB driveIn a press release announcing its “Green” efforts, Lake Forest’s Western Digital buried the news that it now has a 1-terabyte hard drive.

No specifics are mentioned in the press release, but WD just verified that this is indeed a “single (four platter) drive. It is our first 1 TB drive,” said Heather Skinner, a WD spokesperson. It ships THIS MONTH! It will first appear in an external MyBook hard drive and next month, will be available as an internal desktop drive.

This puts Western Digital back into the game, which was trailing more than a year behind largest rival Seagate Technology with a 750-GB drive. While Hitachi announced the first 1-TB drive in January, Seagate just got around to its first terabyte drive last month. Maybe that’s why Western Digital didn’t make a big fuss about this.

WD’s GreenPower initiativeNow back to its GreenPower effort, Western Digital is calling its line of external and internal hard drives “environmentally friendly,” because they “save up to 40 percent in hard-drive power consumption, or as much as $10 per drive per year.”

Technically, WD’s new drives consume 5 watts less than the typical 1 TB drive (which uses 13.5 watts). And it reduces CO2 emission by 60 kilograms per drive per year.

To qualify as an Energy Star 4.0 computing system, the company needed to minimize its carbon footprint and offer savings in electricity costs. While saving $10 a year doesn’t sound like much, WD points out that this could help a data center with 10,000 drives save $100,000 a year in energy costs plus reduce CO2 emission by 600 metric tons — the equivalent of taking almost 400 cars off the road for a year.

The first “GreenPower” drive is the WD Caviar GP, or the aforementioned 1 TB drive. GreenPower versions of enterprise and consumer-electronics drives will be available in the third quarter, which is now.

As for price, no specifics yet. Says Heather with WD: “The new 1TB drives will be in price parity to Hitachi’s 1 TB drive.”

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