Olive's music players are the kind of crazy high-end AV hardware that peasants like you and I shouldn't even be reading about, let alone contemplating. The 4 HD rips CDs to its huge 2TB hard drive, in addition to streaming from a PC, to be played through crazy high-end speakers. It's got a nice 4.3-inch touchscreen, and it's pretty nice-looking. So what's new? Well, the ports are all gold-plated, and the 4 HD adds a DAC the Opus N4 didn't have:

* Proprietary, high resolution DAC featuring Texas Instrument's 192khz/24-bit Burr-Brown PCM1792A.
* DAC may be used as an outboard DAC for any digital music source. With 24-bit/192kHz oversampling, noise and distortion are ultra low resulting in incredible purity in both high frequencies and low-level detail.

Basically it's a super simplified music player (just music, mind you, no other media) for incredibly rich old people for whom the CD is something they've just gotten comfortable with in the last six months or so. It's pretty, we'll give it that, but it seems like the kind of thing you'd see in SkyMall, not your buddy's entertainment center. It's available now for $2,000. [Olive]

LAKE FOREST, Calif., July 27 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — WD (NYSE: WDC) today announced two new mobile hard drives that reach new capacity extremes. The highlight is a one terabyte model — the industry's highest-capacity 2.5-inch drive available. Industry-leading 333 GB-per-platter technology enables the new WD Scorpio® Blue(TM) SATA 2.5-inch hard drives to offer mobile storage device and notebook users an enormous 1 TB capacity. A 750 GB WD Scorpio Blue model also will be available.

The WD Scorpio Blue 750 GB and 1 TB hard drives have a 12.5 mm form factor(1) and are ideally suited for use in portable storage solutions, such as the newly released My Passport(TM) Essential(TM) SE Portable USB Drives. Other applications include select notebooks and small form factor desktop PCs, where quiet and cool operation are important. Both WD Scorpio Blue drives deliver high-performance with a 3 gigabits per second (Gb/s) transfer rate.

"The convergence of the growing mobile computing and digital media trends produces demand for desktop-like capacities in portable devices," said Jim Morris, senior vice president and general manager of client systems at WD. "Our new WD Scorpio Blue drives enable people to take even more of their digital collections with them wherever they go and, realizing the value of their data, back up their notebooks on their My Passport drives."

WD Scorpio Blue hard drives offer high-performance, low power consumption and cool operation in portable applications. They are designed with WD features to be reliable and shock resistant while also delivering industry-leading capacity and performance.

WD Scorpio Blue Features

WhisperDrive(TM) - WD's exclusive WhisperDrive technology combines state-of-the-art seeking algorithms to produce one of the quietest 2.5-inch drives available.

ShockGuard(TM) - Leading-edge ShockGuard technology combines firmware and hardware advancements to meet the highest combined shock tolerance specifications required for mobile and notebook applications.

SecurePark(TM) - Parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down and when the drive is off. This ensures the recording head never touches the disk surface, resulting in improved long-term reliability due to less head wear and improved shock tolerance.

Price and Availability

WD Scorpio Blue 750 GB drives (model WD7500KEVT) are available now through select distributors and resellers; the 1 TB capacity (model WD10TEVT) is available now configured into My Passport Essential SE USB drives. The manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP) for the WD Scorpio Blue 1 TB drive is $249.99 USD and for the 750 GB version it is $189.99 USD. WD Scorpio Blue hard drives are covered by a three-year limited warranty.

The drive didn't mount. It spinned up, but nothing happened. The BIOS didn't show anything and the noise, that horrible rattling noise of a thousand-cockroach horde running viciously through a tin tube, kept roaring. "Something is very wrong here," he thought after trying every trick in the book. It was then when he decided to open the drive on the bench at his Spring/Nextel's tech support office. Voiding the warranty of the new Fujitsu MHV2040AH drive, he was shocked when he found this mess:

"Shattered? How the heck can a hard drive plate be shattered in this way? This is not possible."

The drive was new and there were no visible marks outside. And as you can see in the images, the drive plate shattered on its own. Somehow. There are no signs of hammering or violence anywhere, except for the metal shards themselves. Chris swears that this is what happened and has no explanation about it, except that the 10,000rpm engine of the drive may have gone crazy at one point. I find that unlikely but who knows. Any expert in hard drives out there can tell us how this may happened?

While you think, here's some good music that matches the theme of this post (at least in its title). [Thanks Chris]

The author says he took "the audio output of an amplifier and added a clamping diode and feed the signal into one of the phases on the worm drive motor. To give the motor a louder sound I added a small DC voltage to the other phase. This coil had the oppisite polarity then that of the audio phase."

Apparently, only the lightsaber sound was added to the montage later. [Star Wars Blog]

Jerry had an accident while biking, losing his finger. He got an artificial finger made of silicon, and instead of just giving it logical sexual uses, he decided to make it even more useful and embed a 2GB USB drive inside. The result is equally as gross as is fascinating. [Flickr via Bergie]

The company—which has been deleting messages from customers reporting on the problem left, right, and center—has offered a software fix, but it's saying that people are not entitled to any other kind of compensation or replacement. I smell class-action lawsuit. [The Inquirer via Electronista]

While this may be just a standard hardware switch and not a concerted effort to block piracy, some keen-eyed modders quickly noticed the change—in the latest drive revision, found in an Australian model with the serial number LAH1098xxxxx, the drive controller chip necessary for previous mods had been completely replaced by a new one.

What they have done is combine the old D1A and drive controller chip in to one which is now called the GC2-D3, as you can see from the photo there is a big blank space on the PCB where the controller chip used to be.

So far there haven't been any other reports of these Wiis showing up outside of Australia, so it may be a while before we see them widespread and by then, I'm guessing there will probably already be a workaround. Kiddies who just can't wait to open up their new Wiis and solder up a mod chip on Christmas morning, though, should probably double check which drive they have first. [mywii.com.au via GoNintendo]

At its core, the system is a dual-fan USB-powered laptop cooler with extra USB ports. Enter Brando, and this simple device gets injected with a rear-loaded 2.5" SATA hard drive dock to add extra storage. It's hard to believe that the average laptop USB port can power two fans, a SATA drive and three additional USB devices, but it looks like there's AC power to back up the system (the product description was a bit light on this point).

The USB Notebook Cooling Pad + 3-Port Hub + 2.5" HDD is available now for $33. Live it up. [Brando]

- Beer-filled USB flash drives
- Fetus USB flash drives
- Sawed-off USB flash drives
- Carabiner USB flash drives
- USB flash drives shaped like obsolete equipment
- Food-shaped USB flash drives
- Arty meta-storage USB flash drives [AP]

Yes, that would be a great reason to buy a Zune, but keep in mind that the question could refer to using the Zune simply as a means to upload pictures and audio tracks to the 360 (although that would be ridiculous because nobody would give a damn). And, of course, it may mean nothing at all. We shall have to wait and see if Microsoft does the smart thing here. [Zune Survey via Xbox 360 Fanboy]

Is capitalism really that great, if it leads to beer-filled USB flash drives with "optional customizable floating objects" inside? Should we Americans really be that pleased with our free speech, if it means I get emails from people who make flash drives with BEER in them? And am I really secure with myself as a gadget dork, getting all excited over the latest and greatest shiny toys, if that same email brags about the floating objects being in 3D? How could they be anything but 3D, when they're actual, physical objects? I can't pretend like the world is the same after this. The sun doesn't shine as bright. The air doesn't taste as sweet. Congratulations, Beer-Filled USB Drive Manufacturer. You've broken me. [CNK]

It's a bit like measuring the aerodynamic properties of a car that is standing still in a car park during a powerful storm. Our new wind tunnel, on the other hand, has been designed to exactly replicate the flow of air around and underneath the car when driving on a real road at speeds of up to 155kph. Our wind tunnel uses sophisticated techniques at the forefront of aerodynamic technology

This means that they have been able to reduce the air resistance in their new Volvo C30 DRIVe by 10%. That's 11.88 gallons of gas per 9,300 miles, an average driving year. Not too shabby. [Gizmag]