Hasta La Gadget!

Can’t say we really expected to see anything from Western Digital here at CeBIT, but sure enough, it brought along its 2TB Caviar Green hard drive, WD TV HD media player and the new 8TB ShareSpace NAS. Along with oodles of other external, internal and somewhere-in-between drives, too. We actually kind of spazzed upon seeing two terabytes of empty space within a single internal HDD, but hopefully the blur isn’t too noticeable. Enjoy!

Filed under: Storage

Western Digital 2TB Caviar Green, 8TB ShareSpace and friends eyes-on originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 Mar 2009 22:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

As we’ve seen with the MacBook Air, Apple clearly feels there are a select group of you out there who can live without an optical drive on your laptop. Now, MCE is giving you unibody MacBook and MacBook Pro owners a similar option. The OptiBay is essentially a second hard drive that is installed internally in place of the optical disc drive, giving MB and MBP users the ability to vastly increase their storage space or tap into a RAID setup. The company has announced that said solution is shipping today to those interested, with options including 250GB, 320GB and 500GB drives. Oh, and if you’re worried about that optical drive you’ll be removing, fret not — these guys have a nifty external enclosure designed specifically to give it another home. How quaint.

[Via Macworld]

Filed under: Laptops, Peripherals

MCE’s OptiBay exchanges unibody MacBook optical drive for HDD originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

It’s not exactly a huge surprise at this point, but Fujitsu and Toshiba have announced today that they’ve signed a memorandum of understanding on the transfer of Fujitsu’s hard drive business to Toshiba, and that they plan to conclude a transfer contract “at an early date.” To make the transition as smooth as possible, Fujitsu says it’ll spinning off all its HDD-related business into a separate company in the interim, which Toshiba will buy an 80 percent stake in and make a Toshiba Group subsidiary. Then, once things are fully transitioned, Toshiba will buy up the remaining 20 percent and make the company a wholly owned subsidiary. Notably absent from today’s announcement, however, is any word of a dollar figure, though previous reports had pegged the deal at anywhere from $335 to $447 million. Toshiba also doesn’t seem like it’ll be resting on its laurels once the deal is complete, saying that it hopes to increase its overall HDD market share 20 percent by the year 2015.

Filed under: Storage

Fujitsu and Toshiba reach agreement on hard drive business deal originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

I’m a music junkie, I admit it. But honestly, I thought that I would have appeased all of my pocket music library needs when I upgraded my iPod from 20GB to 80GB. It helped for a while, but every so often I find myself deleting yet another 30-minute experimental jazz track from my hard drive to make way for more new music. I have a problem.

iPod repair site, RapidRepair.com has a solution–a temporary one at least. The site today announced the addition of a 240GB iPod hard drive to its list of music player upgrades. No word on price yet, though the site’s 120GB hard drive is priced at $189.99, and I’m guessing you can add at least $20 to that price.

According to the site, the hard drive will be available for all 5G iPods. iPod Classic and Zune 2G are expected to be available at some point as well. In the meantime the site has a waiting list for the 5G models.

It’s been a long time coming, but Seagate’s finally unveiled its first 2TB hard drive, the 3.5-inch Constellation ES. The hefty spinner also comes in 500GB and 1TB varieties and runs at 7,200RPM, which should make it a bit faster than Western Digital’s behemoth, according to reviews for the latter. It’ll be out calendar Q3, which we take to be fancy schmancy business talk for “this Summer.” Meanwhile, the 2.5-inch ES-less Constellation line sports 3 Gbps SATA and SAS 2.0 interface. Look for this one in 160GB and 500GB sizes sometime this quarter, with Dell said to be one the first companies to offer the drives. Check out one more out-of-this-world promotional image after the break.

Continue reading Seagate’s 2TB Constellation ES is rife with potential space puns

Filed under: Storage

Seagate’s 2TB Constellation ES is rife with potential space puns originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 03 Feb 2009 08:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments