Hasta La Gadget!

There’s no veil of secrecy covering this one, but Western Digital has finally come clean with the industry’s first 2TB internal hard drive. Launched today in the USA, the planet’s highest capacity single HDD — otherwise known as the 2TB Caviar Green ($299; available now) — sits on a 3.5-inch platform, includes 32MB of cache and is based around WD’s 500GB per platter technology (with 400Gb/in2 areal density). HotHardware was able to take a sneak peek at this here device (a pre-engineering sample, as it were), and was gracious enough to host up some juicy benchmark results for those eager to see how this capacious beast performed. Against the formidable Spinpoint F1 (Samsung) and Barracuda 7200.11 (Seagate), the WD managed to hold its own, which is saying a lot for a drive of this magnitude. Check the full release after the break.

Continue reading Western Digital’s 2TB Caviar Green hard drive launches, gets previewed

Filed under: Storage

Western Digital’s 2TB Caviar Green hard drive launches, gets previewed originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Jan 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This floppy-shaped recordable CD is, at first glance, a splendidly retro device. Push it down onto the spindle of the drive and you can look forward to 200 whole Megabytes of storage.

Unfortunately, that’s where it ends. Try cramming this into a modern, slot loading drive and you’ll need to take the computer apart to get it back again. And that’s before we even get to the price.

A 50-pack of rewritable discs can be picked up for a few bucks these days, which makes the price of these novelties even more shocking. A single floppy will cost a hard $10, plus another $4 for shipping. Insane.

Much better, and a great idea for a future how-to project, would be to hack a USB stick together with a floppy. That way you could cram a fistful of Gigabytes into a mere 3.5 inches.

Product page [Design Boom via BBG]

Question: What would you do with a 2TB SD card, a card of such voluminous capacity that you can hear cathedral-like echoes clanging around any MP3 file stored upon it?

To help you decide, here are some numbers: 100 HD movies, 480 hours of HD video recording, 136,000 "fine mode" photos, and enough MP3 files to last the rest of your life (this last is according to my poor math).

So, what would you do? the answer is, of course, lose it. And if it was the even smaller MicroSD card pictured, you’d lose it even quicker. Imagine dropping your entire photo collection down the drain when swapping out cards from the camera. Shiver.

Of course, you can’t buy a 2TB card right now. Instead, SDXC is the new spec from the SD Association which allows a theoretical maximum of 2TB, meaning the way has been opened for manufacturers to offer bigger and bigger memory cards for cameras. It is also quick, with a current maximum transfer speed of 104 MB per second, rising to 300 MB per second when the kinks are worked out. Compare that to the 200x speed SD card which gives a comparatively pathetic 30 MB per second.

So, relax. By the time 2TB is actually affordable, you’re camera will be recording 100 megapixel HDR images every time you click the shutter, so you’ll probably only fit 100 photos on a card anyway.

Product page [SD Association]

LaCie already delivered two new pieces in its collection yesterday, but apparently the 2big Quadra simply demanded its very own day of promotion. The classically styled (thanks, Neil Poulton) drive arrives with twin bays for up to 3TB of storage and support for four RAID modes including the traditional RAID 0 / 1. Transfer speeds can hit up to 165MB/sec through eSATA (3Gbits/sec in RAID 0), and the the quadruple interface — USB 2.0, eSATA, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 — means that whatever machine you happen upon will likely be equipped to handle it. Moreover, it’s fully compatible with Apple’s Time Machine software and comes bundled with Genie Backup Manager Pro / Intego Backup Manager Pro for those in need. It’ll be yours for the taking later this month (in 1TB, 2TB and 3TB sizes) starting at $299.99.

Filed under: Storage

LaCie breaks off quad-interface 2big Quadra RAID drive originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s a list of the very best gear we’ve seen this year. It’s more bragger’s guide than buyer’s guide—if you have any of this, you can officially tell your friends to suck on it.

The year winds to an end and every product worth a damn has already hit store shelves—there’s not going to be any new shiny coolness until next month’s CES. We were lucky enough to have a look at most of the best gear out there, and we’ve passed judgment on all that we saw. Here’s a complete list of great products, yanked from our first looks, reviews, and epic Battlemodos:

TV & HOME THEATER
TVs:
Panasonic 65VX100U Plasma
Pioneer Kuro Elite PRO-111FD Plasma
Sony Bravia XBR8 LCD
Panasonic PZ850 Series Plasma
Samsung 650 and 750 Series LCD
Honorable mention for value: Toshiba Regza RV535 Series LCD

Surround Bar:
Yamaha YSP-3050 Sound Bar

Blu-ray Player:
Pioneer Elite BDP-09FD
Samsung Netflix BD-P2500
Sony PlayStation 3

Blu-ray Movies (with iTunes/WMV Digital Copy):
The Dark Knight
Wall-E

CAMERAS & CAMCORDERS
DSLR Cameras:
Nikon D300 and D700
Canon EOS 5D Mark II with HD video
Nikon D90 with HD video
Canon Rebel XSi and Rebel XS
Honorable mention for value: Sony Alpha A900 and Alpha A300

Point and Shoot Camera:
Canon SD790

Crazy Hybrid Camera/Camcorder:
Casio Exilim EX-F1

Mini Camcorders:
Kodak Zi6 HD
Pure Digital Flip Ultra

COMPUTERS & ACCESSORIES
Laptops:
MacBook/MacBook Pro
Lenovo X300
MSI Wind

All-In-One PC:
Vaio LV

Routers:
Linksys WRT610N Dual N-Band Wireless Router

Router/NAS:
Apple Time Capsule

NAS:
HP MediaVault mv2120

Mouse:
Logitech MX 1100 Mouse

Keyboard:
SteelSeries 7G Pro Gaming Keyboard

iPod/iPhone USB Dock:
Griffin Simplifi iPod-iPhone Dock/Card Reader/USB Hub

PHONES & PORTABLE DEVICES
Phones:
Apple iPhone 3G @ AT&T
Sidekick 2008 @ T-Mobile
Samsung Instinct @ Sprint (after firmware update, it’s officially better than Verizon’s LG Dare)
LG Decoy with docking Bluetooth earpiece @ Verizon
Sony Ericsson W890i @ Europe only; unlocked may be available

Phone Stereo Headsets:
Maximo iMetal iP-HS2 Isolators
Shure Music Phone Adapter to use with your current earphones

In-Ear Headphones:
Etymotics hf5
Shure SE110
Ultimate Ears metro.fi 2

Pico Projector:
Aiptek PocketCinema V10

GPS:
Garmin Nuvi 785T with lane guidance
Garmin Nuvi 880 with speech recognition

ASSORTED CRAZY STUFF
Flashlights:
Wicked Lasers Torch Flashlight
Duracell Daylite CR123

Toy Robot:
U-Command Wall-E

Cheap Night Vision Goggles:
Jakks Pacific EyeClops

Unmanned Vehicle:
Draganfly X6 UAV

Spy Gadget Book:
Spycraft by Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton

Water Guns:
Super Soaker Sneak Attack 4-Way

—With reporting by Erica Ho