Hasta La Gadget!

This whole global economic crisis, and its resulting massive loss of jobs got us thinking. We here at Engadget didn’t want to stand helplessly by, announcing every new round of misery without giving anything back — so we decided to take the opportunity to spread a little positivity. We’ll be handing out a new gadget every day (except for weekends) to lucky readers until we run out of stuff or companies stop sending things. Today we’ve got a 120GB Samsung S1 Mini portable hard drive (USB 2.0) ready to carry all sorts of love letters, Third Eye Blind jams and old skateboarding vids from high school. Read the rules below (no skimming — we’re omniscient and can tell when you’ve skimmed) and get commenting! Hooray for free stuff!

Major thanks to Samsung for providing the gear!

The rules:

• Leave a comment below. Any comment will do, but if you want to share your proposal for “fixing” the world economy, that’d be sweet too.
• You may only enter this specific giveaway once. If you enter this giveaway more than once you’ll be automatically disqualified, etc. (Yes, we have robots that thoroughly check to ensure fairness.)
• If you enter more than once, only activate one comment. This is pretty self explanatory. Just be careful and you’ll be fine.
  
• Contest is open to anyone in the 50 States, 18 or older! Sorry, we don’t make this rule (we hate excluding anyone), so be mad at our lawyers and contest laws if you have to be mad.
• Winner will be chosen randomly. The winner will receive one (1) 120GB Samsung S1 Mini portable HDD, model number HXSU012BA. Approximate retail value is $137.99.
• If you are chosen, you will be notified by email. Winners must respond within three days of the end of the contest. If you do not respond within that period, another winner will be chosen.
• Entries can be submitted until Wednesday, April 15th, at 11:59PM ET. Good luck!
• Full rules can be found here.

Filed under: Announcements, Storage

Engadget’s recession antidote: win a 120GB Samsung S1 Mini HDD! originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Man, the consolidation efforts are really heating up. Just days after Cisco forked out a small fortune to acquire Pure Digital, HDD mainstay Western Digital has penned a check for $65 million in cold, hard cash in order to acquire SiliconSystems, Inc. Said outfit is an Aliso Viejo, California-based supplier of solid-state drives for the embedded systems market, and rather than wasting any more time falling behind in the SSD realm, WD figured it prudent to just buy the technology it needed to position itself as a legitimate competitor. WD has already made clear that it hopes to sell SSDs for the netbook, client and enterprise markets, and given that integration will begin “immediately,” we’re hoping to see some shipping products sooner rather than later.

Filed under: Storage

Western Digital enters SSD market via $65m SiliconSystems acquisition originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While it’s still not nearly as capacious as Western Digital’s latest green hard drive, Samsung’s 1.5TB EcoGreen F2EG is still plenty roomy for most. Of course, we’re still trying to decide if both “Eco” and “Green” were really necessary in the model name, but we digress. The drive sports 500GB per platter, and reportedly, it sucks down less power (around 40 percent less, in fact) than most HDDs thanks to the awesomely named EcoTriangle technology. Check it right this second for a buck forty-nine.

[Via Physorg]

Filed under: Storage

Samsung spills 1.5TB EcoGreen F2EG hard drive originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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.

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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.

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