Quick Test: Seagate's 1TB Portable FreeAgent Go

The season of the 1TB bus-powered USB drive is upon us. WD was first; now Seagate is shipping the FreeAgent Go, a chunky SOB—three platters worth of storage powered and connected by one skinny cable. More »

Leaked Western Digital TV-2 Media Player Reveals Modest Upgrades, Codec Support

Western Digital's decent WD TV was a moderately priced 1080p-pumping media player at $130. WD, apparently content to not mess with success, is preparing a slight feature update in the upcoming TV-2. More »

WD Scorpio Blue Drive Is First One Terabyte Mobile Drive Ever—Yes, 1TB

I seriously need the new WD Scorpio one terabyte drive. I want to be able to tote around all my desktop data, without any external drives hanging around, and $250 seems like a little price to pay for that. More »

Western Digital's SiliconDrive III Lineup Are Their First SSD Offerings

Western Digital just made their first move into the SSD world by announcing that their now shipping the SiliconDrive III lineup (presumably to OEMs), promising storage capacities up to 120 GB and read/write speeds of 100 and 80 MB/sec, respectively. More »

WD My Book Studio Edition II: 4 Terabytes + 4 Interfaces

WD's My Book Studio Edition II now comes with a pair of 2TB drives and a choice of four interfaces: USB 2.0, eSATA, FireWire 400 and FW800. Having 4TB plus all those options'll cost you, though: $650 MSRP. [Western Digital]

Best Buy Sells Egregiously Crappy, 9-Year-Old Hard Drive As New, Then Refuses Refund

Best Buy customer Jon purchased a brand-new Western Digital hard drive for store pickup, but when he opened the (sealed) package at home, he found a 30GB, near-decade-old product instead. Best Buy's reaction? "Tough luck." More »

Western Digital 2TB My Book World Drive Uses One Single 2TB Disk

Western Digital's hit 2TB on their external drives before, but this is the first time they've done it using one single 2TB disk. More »

Western Digital's 8TB ShareSpace NAS is One Beast of a Storage Hub

Western Digital's new 8TB ShareSpace NAS is a monster of a storage system for you media hoarders who want to share your good between multiple computers. More »

Western Digital WD20WEADS Is the First 2TB Internal Drive

Remember when 1TB, 3.5-inch drives were all the rage? Well those days are over, as Western Digital has released their 2TB Caviar Green, available now for $299. More »

Hard Drive Failure Soundboard Guarantees Debilitating Flashbacks

Data recovery service Datacent has put together an extensive collection of recordings of popular hard drives failing. This might sound pretty boring, but it isn't just bunch of typical of click-click-bzzzzz heartbreakers — a lot of these sounds are downright bizarre. Who knew that Maxtor drives play a song when their spindles fail? Or that failing Hitachi Deskstars wrote every Autechre track, ever? Or that Toshiba laptop drives are actually screeching Helldemons with an acute sense of pain? [Datacent via Slashdot]

Western Digital WD TV HD Media Player Streams from Hard Drives on the Cheap

Western Digital, better known for storage than HD video equipment, looks to have thrown their hat into the video streaming ring with the WD TV HD Media Player. With two USB 2.0 drives working simultaneously, you can plug in your USB storage and stream to your HDTV in 1080p over HDMI or composite. The diminutive box comes with a remote control and what seems to be proprietary browsing software. It's available now from Best Buy for a competitive $130, which is a solid price for an HD streamer even if it's snuck in under the rader a bit. [Engadget]

Question of the Day: Which Hard Drives Have Crashed On You?

Today when I wrote up a WD RAID drive, the comment boxes were flooded with WD gripes. The funny thing is, the reverse happened when we wrote about Seagate a while ago. And Buchanan won't shut up about Hitachi's infamous "Death Star" drives. Are all drives equally prone to fail, or are there some makers who get it right more often than others? Yes, we would like you to share your most heart-wrenching drive crash stories, if you've finally got up the courage to talk about it. But first: More »

WD MyBook Mirror Edition: Nothing Says "Safe" Like a Personal 2TB RAID Drive

WD just launched a drive that looks awfully familiar: Because the WD MyBook Mirror Edition houses two 3.5" GreenPower drives—in this case either 500GB or 1TB each—it uses the same case as the networked MyBook World Edition. But this one is just for you, and you alone. The Mirror, which costs $550 for 2TB version and $290 for a single TB, has only a USB 2.0 jack on the back. It comes Windows-formatted (though there's also one for Macs). As its name suggests, it comes RAID 1 (mirror) configured, but it can be set for striping instead, if that's how your geek flag flies. [Western Digital]

Western Digital Researching 20,000RPM Hard Disk to Fight Solid State Drives

According to blog Bit-Tech.net, sources in the hard drive industry say that Western Digital (maker of the old world's fastest hard drive) "is working on a 20,000RPM Raptor hard drive to combat" Solid State Drives, since these are going to "be affordable in the next 12 or 18 months." The new Raptor will be a 2.5-inch drive inside a 3.5-inch custom box designed to make it "silent," since a 20,000RPM HD could probably make your ears bleed after a few minutes at fulll speed. But can a mechanical drive compete against solid state? More »

WD Joins 7200rpm Club with 320GB 2.5-Inch Scorpio Black Drives

Today Western Digital announced its Scorpio Black 2.5" drive line, which reach 7200rpm, though at 5400rpm power demands. Like certain Fujitsu and Hitachi drives announced earlier this year, the speedy drives will ship in capacities from 80GB up to 320GB. The top model, with built-in free-fall sensor for drive protection, costs $250. [WD]

Western Digital Velociraptor Is New "Fastest Hard Drive Ever"

Western Digital has announced the Velociraptor ($300 retail), their latest and greatest in speedy storage. Connecting through 3GB/s SATA, the 300GB, 10,000RPM Velociraptor is actually a 2.5" hard drive with a massive "Icepack" heatsink that makes it large enough to fit in a 3.5" bay. Maximum PC already got their hands on a preproduction unit. So how fast was it? Real fast. More »

Dealzmodo: 500GB Western Digital Hard Drive for $100, a Sign of Things to Come?

Buy.com has the 500GB Western Digital Elements external hard drive for $100 shipped, marked down from $140. (Around the web, this drive sells for $115-$140.) Now that Time Machine is compatible with any hard drive networked to an Airport Extreme, some of you might be interested in picking up something. This is the best deal that we could find, but we're sure you've seen better. See any deals?? [Dealhack]

Seven One-Terabyte Hard Drives Enter, Seven Leave (But Only One is the Best)

ExtremeTech just compared seven one-terabyte hard drives with varying platter sizes and architectures and discovered that the drives are actually all quite similar, but with minor variations in power, noise and speed. If you're looking for a low power, low noise drive that's lightly slower than the rest—perhaps for a media center box— Western Digital's GreenPower (WD1000FYPS) drives could be for you. If you're looking for the absolute best in performance, then Samsung Spinpoint HD103UJ won most of the tests ExtremeTech ran. And at $260, it's actually the second cheapest drive they tested. [ExtremeTech]

Western Digital 320GB My Passport Essential Drives: Pretty and Priced Right

Today Western Digital introduced its newly redesigned My Passport Essential drives, in capacities of 160, 250 and 320GB, that last one priced at a very pleasant $200. The shiny bus-powered drives don't pack anything unusual, but they do come with WD Sync for easy Windows backup and 128-bit encryption. [WD]

Western Digital Finally Pops 320GB USB-Powered Passport Drive

When you saw the news that WD launched a 320GB Scorpio laptop drive, you knew it was only a matter of time before a bus-powered Passport external version showed up. It'll come with WD Sync software (featuring 128-bit encryption; Windows only of course), deliver 480Mbps transfer speeds, and you can pick from five colors: glossy black, glossy white, metallic red, vibrant(?) green and metallic pink. Here's the best part: the 320GB Passport will only set you back $230—or less. [WD]

Western Digital's Greenpower Eco-Drives Go 500GB

If those 1TB Greenpower eco-friendly low-powered hard drives from Western Digital were too much space for you, they're now shipping 500GB models that conform to their Greenpower standards. At $149, they're not all that much more expensive compared with regular drives, either. [WD]

Western Digital Ships 320GB 2.5-Inch Drives for Laptops

It's official: you can now buy a 320GB drive from WD for your laptop, and for just $200. The WD Scorpio SATA drive spins at 5400rpm and has a 8MB cache. The press release says it's "extraordinarily quiet while running at cool operating temperatures." I hope that doesn't mean it's extremely loud while running at super high temperatures. The important thing is, this timing coincides with the arrival of Mac's Time Machine and the Windows Home Server, two easy ways to offload your laptop's entire contents, swap out the internal drive, then restore your old image without a lot of tinkering. I know some of you like tinkering, but this is the future. [WD]

Western Digital Confirms 500GB My DVR Expander Drive Works With TiVo

Today Western Digital confirmed that its My DVR drive, which had previously been marketed for Scientific Atlanta boxes, was "verified compatible" with TiVo HD and TiVo Series3 DVRs. It's already for sale at Best Buy, and can now be found at TiVo.com/store, too. A 500GB My DVR Expander drive lists for $200. And according to reports, TiVo's eSATA port is ready for Western Digital's drive. (Press release after jump.) More »

Best Buy Leaks First TiVo External HDD?

Earlier last week we brought you news of a TiVo update that provides eSata support with officially licensed HDDs. Well, Best Buy seems to have done the dirty once again, leaking what appears to be the first TiVo supported hard drive. More »

Western Digital Announces Record Breaking Hard Drive Density

Today Western Digital announced that it has achieved 520 Gb/in2 areal density in an actual demonstration using its own perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR)/tunneling magneto-resistive (TuMR) head technology. For those of you who are counting, that makes it the highest density ever reached using continuous media. A density of this magnitude produces a 3.5-inch hard drive storing 640 GB-per-platter and single hard drive capacities as large as 3 TB. Compare that to the current leading density of around 200 Gb/in2 being shipped high volume products like WD's 250 GB Scorpio(R) 2.5-inch drive. That's all well and good, but it looks like you will have to wait to get your hands on this technology. Current estimates put the release at around 2010. More »

Mechanical Patent Dispute Could Result in Hard Drive Ban

Hot on the heels of yesterday's potential Australian plasma ban, comes news of the U.S. possibly banning many popular hard drives due to a patent dispute. The issue involves a patent for "dissipative ceramic bonding tips," also known as wire bonding tips, which Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, HP, and Dell either use in their own foreign manufacturing process or sell in products that were built, in countries other than the U.S., using them. According to Ars Technica, the problem at hand resides under Section 337 of the Tariff Act. More »

Western Digital follows up last Thursday's My Book announcement with 1TB My Book Studio edition for Macs with Firewire 400/800, USB 2.0 and eSATA. [Western Digital]