Tag Archives: Western Digital
Floods In Thailand Causes Hard Drive Prices To Increase
Over the last three months, Thailand has been dealing with a series of floods that cost the lives of over four hundred people. About 2.3 million have been impacted. The financial impact is expected to be about $5.1 billion. Some of the companies that were directly affected by the floods include Western Digital, Toshiba, and Seagate. Thailand is the largest manufacturer of hard drives which accounts for 25% of total worldwide production and the floods are causing a shortage of supplies.
(more…)
Categories Samsung Electronics Inc., Seagate, Toshiba, Western Digital
1 Comment
Western Digital Launches WD TV HD Media Player
Western Digital has launched a new product called the WD TV Live HD Media Player. The WD TV allows you to watch digital media on your television set using an Internet connection or storage device. The WD TV has an Ethernet port along with USB WiFi support. The WD TV can play media from Flickr, Pandora, and YouTube on your TV too.
Playback through the device is 1080p. Almost every kind of digital movie file type is supported no matter what the codec is. There is also an HDMI connection available on the device if you want to directly connect your laptop to the device. The device currently retails for $149.99. Below is additional information from the press release.
Features of the WD TV Live HD Media Player include:
- Full-HD 1080p video playback and navigation with the included remote control and crisp, animated navigation menus;
- Play a wide variety of file formats including support for a wide variety of the most popular file formats with no need to spend time transcoding;
- Play videos, music and photos from the Internet on your big screen TV and discover new music with Pandora Internet radio or listen to thousands of radio stations via Live365 Internet radio;
- Ethernet port for wired or WiFi connection1 to access files anywhere on the network to play movies, music, and photos from any PC or drive on a home network;
- Turns a USB drive2 into an HD media player and plays content from most popular USB drives, and digital cameras, camcorders, and portable media players that can be recognized as mass storage devices;
- Unlimited media collection, just add more USB drives for more space;
- Two USB ports for seamless media playback from multiple USB drives and ability to access them simultaneously while a media library feature collects the content on all the drives into one list sorted by media type;
- Transfer files by copying, moving or deleting files stored on a USB drive, a network drive, camcorder, or a camera to the attached USB drive using the on-screen menus;
- Picture Transfer Protocol support to show photos and movies directly from digital camera or video camera and or any digital imaging device that supports Picture Transfer Protocol;
- Advanced navigation options including thumbnail and list views, media library and search;
- Photo viewing to create custom slide shows, zoom and pan and search;
- Movie viewing with fast-forward, rewind, pause, zoom and pan, view subtitles, and search;
- Music playback with fast-forward, rewind, pause, shuffle, repeat and search;
- File copying between USB devices;
- HDMI® 1.3 port, composite video and component video output3 for the highest quality HDTV or home theater;
- SPDIF digital output that sends digital signals to your AV receiver for the best surround sound experience; and,
- Ultra-compact design to fit easily into a home entertainment center.
Categories Western Digital, Western Digital WD TV
Leave a comment
Western Digital Shipping 7200RPM 2TB Hard Drives
Western Digital has built two internal hard drives for desktops. The Caviar black model is on the left and the RE4 is on the right in the picture above. The speed of the hard drives are 7200RPM and both drives have a 64MB cache with dual stage actuators. Both hard drives have a 3Gbps SATA interface and integrated dual processors. There is also a multi-axis shock sensor. The Caviar Black model costs $299 and the RE4 is awaiting an MSRP. Press release after the jump.
Categories Jim Morris, Tom McDorman, Western Digital
Leave a comment
Western Digital Introduces 1TB Laptop Hard Drive
Today, WD announced that it’s now shipping a 1TB mobile hard drive. The hard drive, Scorpio Blue , has a standard 2.5 inch laptop form factor. The drive is available for $250.00. A 750GB version of the drive is available for $190.
An external version of the drive is also being introduced for $300.
The company says it is the first to ship a 1TB laptop hard drive.
The hard drive features ShockGuard to improve shock tolerance. It also features SecurePark technology which parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down and when the drive is not running.
Categories Western Digital
1 Comment
WD Packs 4TB Into My Book Studio Edition II External Hard Drive
About a year ago, Western Digital announced that they have launched a 2TB external hard drive. But now they have doubled the capacity in the My Book Studio Edition II. The external hard drive is a dual-drive with 2TB each in a RAID 0 configuration. It is compatible with Macs and PCs. Connection options include FireWire 400, FireWire 800, eSATA, and USB 2.0. This high capacity hard drive comes at a high price of $649.99.
[via Engadget]
Categories WD My Book Studio Edition II, Western Digital
1 Comment
Western Digital Acquires SiliconSystems Inc. For $65 Million
Western Digital Corporation announced today that they have acquired SiliconSystems for $65 million in cash. SiliconSystems is a small manufacturing company of solid-state drives (SSDs). This instantly brings Western Digital into the solid-state drives market. SSDs are commonly found in netbooks developed by Acer, Lenovo, HP, and Dell.
SiliconSystems develops SSDs with SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB and CF interfaces. “SiliconSystems’ intellectual property and technical expertise will significantly accelerate WD’s solid-state drive development programs for the netbook, client and enterprise markets, providing greater choice for our customers to satisfy all their storage requirements,” stated Western Digital CEO John Coyne.
SiliconSystems was started in 2002 and has about 65 employees. So far, they have sold about 4 million SiliconDrive units to companies of various markets.
Seagate Technology LLC, the world’s largest hard drive company has not yet produced a solid-state disk drive, but after Western Digital made this acquisition, they may start looking into it.
[via ComputerWorld]
Categories John Coyne, SiliconSystems, Western Digital
Leave a comment