Tag archive: western digital

Announced over the past week, both Western Digital and Seagate plan to decrease the length of warranty periods on consumer-grade hard drives in order to reduce costs and push more money back into product development. Beginning January 2, 2012, the three year warranty on Western Digital Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue hard drives will be reduced to 2 years. This will only affect purchases of these drives made after January 1 2012 as… Read More

As of this week, Western Digital has reopened an important production factory in Bang Pa-in, Thailand according to an official statement from the company. Production facilities within Thailand makes up 60 percent of Western Digital products and the company employs approximately 37,000 workers in the country. The heavy flooding that occurred in mid-October devastated the region and companies such as Western Digital and Sony were forced to close… Read More

As predicted, the price of hard drives has soared a staggering 180 percent, in some cases, due to widespread, long-term flooding in Thailand. According to computer engineer Marc Bevand, who has observed the soaring price tags, 1TB drives have experienced the most notable jump. The literal breaking point, writes Bevand on his blog, Zorinaq, came after the flood waters seeped into the Bang Pa-In Industrial Park, the Navanakorn Industrial Park and… Read More

There are a few truisms in the technology world, and one of them is that storage always gets faster and cheaper. Over the long term, that will undoubtedly stay true, but in the near and medium term traditional hard drive storage is facing a major problem: Record flooding in Thailand. The deluge has forced Western Digital and Toshiba to shut down their hard drive manufacturing facilities in Pathum Thani province, near Bangkok, and hard drive… Read More

Paying Spotify users in the U.S. can now stream the lauded music service on desktops, mobile devices television sets. Last week Spotify announced a deal with WD's TV media player, and today the streaming music company pushed further into the living room by launching an app for the Boxee Box. The app gives premium Spotify users access to the catalog, playlists and more on the TV screen. However, it might be worthy to note that users… Read More

Last week, Apple released updated 2 TB and 3 TB flavors of its backup-oriented Time Capsule drives. The product page for these puppies, which will run you $299 and $499, respectively, tout the inclusion of a “server-grade hard drive” in each device. What does that mean though? Engadget notes that an “enterprise”-qualified hard drive “must sustain a mean time between failure — MTBF for short — in excess… Read More

It's common knowledge that video editors chew through storage space like chainsaws through styrofoam, and storage developer Western Digital is looking to feed that need with a new 6 TB version of its My Book Studio Edition II external hard drive. Aimed primarily at Macintosh users—because, let's face it, a lot of high-end video editing gets done on Macs—the drive features eSATA and FireWire 800 interfaces, with the… Read More

Western Digital has released a new app for Android phones allowing users to remotely view their PC library of photos on the go. WD Photos is compatible with the Droid, Droid Incredible, Nexus One, HTC Evo, and other Android handsets. The app is available on the Android Market today. Unfortunately, there is one stiff requirement for this to work: you must also own a Western Digital network drive. They are a good investment, but many people may… Read More

The world’s largest SATA hard drive is now available from Western Digital. On Tuesday, the company announced both 2.5TB and 3TB versions of its Caviar Green drives. The newest members of the WD family offers 3 or 2.5 terabytes of storage while minimizing the issues PCs tend to have with larger drives – namely, known driver issues with drives over 2.19TB. Both drives use an Advanced Host Controller Interface-compliant Host Bus Adapter to skirt… Read More

Digital storage powerhouse Western Digital has announced the introduction of the My Book Live Home Network Drive, which is designed to provide users with hassle-free centralized home media storage. The network drive boasts transfer speeds up to 100 MBps, which the company claims is twice as fast as other network drives in its class. “Network attached storage presents tremendous opportunity for families wishing to centralize all of their digital… Read More

Storage developer Western Digital has been in the standalone media player game for a little while, but is now making its media storage and streaming solutions more compelling to folks who can't get enough digital media: the new WD TV Live Plus HD media player will not only push high-definition content to a big-screen TV, it can also tap into Netflix via the Internet, letting Netflix subscribers watching a broad library of television… Read More

Hard drive maker WDC has announced its new high capacity Scorpio Blue hard disk drive for notebook computers, a 9.5mm-tall, 2.5-inch drive that offers up to 750 GB of storage capacity, advanced power management to get the most out of batteries, and technology that the company says makes it one of the quietest notebook drives on the market. “WD continues to lead the market with capacity points that enable consumers and business… Read More

Following on the heels of Verbatim, hard drive maker Western Digital has introduced two new external hard drives—the My Book Studio and My Book Elite—that feature E-Ink labels that show a drive's name and remaining capacity, even when the drive is unplugged. The company has also introduced its latest My Passport Elite portable drive with a convenient grab-and-go USB dock. All three drives also feature Western Digital's WD SmartWare… Read More

Storage vendor Western Digital has introduced new versions of its My Book Essential and My Book for Mac external hard drives, adding new WD SmartWare for automatic backups of both Mac and Windows systems, as well as hardware encryption for data protection if the drives are ever lost or stolen. The My Book Essential drives are available in capacities from 500 GB to 2 TB, while the My Book Mac drives range from 640 GB to 2 TB. “Keeping an… Read More