The new hotness in Hard Drives

Overclockers and gamers, prepare to meet your next hard drive: the 300GB VelociRaptor from Western Digital. Said to be 35% faster than previous WD Raptors, the 10,000 RPM drive features a 3Gbps SATA interface, 16MB cache, and impressive 1.4 million hour MTBF thanks in part to the IcePack Mounting Frame. The IcePack heat sink not only keeps the drive spinning extra cool, it also bumps the 2.5-inch HDD to a required 3.5-inch drive bay. Available exclusively on Alienware's ALX gaming desktop this month and then up for grabs for everybody with $300 to burn starting mid-May.

Here come the benchmarks. It's freaky fast -- even holds up well to SSDs at a far better dollar-per-byte ratio according to MaximumPC.

Read -- Tom's Hardware
Read -- MaximumPC
Read -- PCPer
Read -- HotHardware
Read -- The Tech Report

I am so tempted to grab a couple of these to throw in a Raid array in my Shuttle.  If I do, anyone wanna buy a couple 500GB hard drives?

Google: Entire World's Content In An iPod By 2020

Talk about how cool and important storage will be in the future, Google BP Sukhinder Singh Cassidy drove home the point at the Captains of Industry Conference. She pointed out the fact that prices have fallen 3.6 million since 1982, and said that:

"if this trend continues, and the cost of storage continues to decrease, we estimate that somewhere around 2020, all the world's content will fit inside an iPod, and all the world's music would sit in your palm as early as 2015...rendering the CD format unnecessary."

She went on to say:

"We estimate that everyday somewhere around 65,000 new videos are added to YouTube, 100,000 blogs it's just staggering if you look at the rate at which content is being produced."

A 100,000 blogs? wow!!!

[macworld via Gizmodo]

WindSolutions Fixes Your ipod: With Software

If your ipod has ever craped the bed (and if you own one long enough, it will) and your warranty is gone, you may have a software savior.

WindSolutions has released CopyTrans Doctor iPod in beta form, and it could save you a lot of headache. The software is said to recover missing songs, deleted songs, and correct iPod hard drive errors. This might be a better solution to try first before having to give it to the "geniuses" at Apple.

It's currently only for PC, sorry Mac.

CopyTrans Doctor [WindSolutions via Crunchgear]

Hard Drive Writes At 100x Standard Speed

With news that could turn the technology world on its ear, scientist have discovered a way to improved the write speed of a hard drive by 100x faster than current speeds.

Dutch scientist at Radboud University Nijmegen used a special laser to send flashes of polarized light to a 5-micron-wide spot on a disk surface which is heated. But the only problem is that the demonstrated drive has a 5-micron width, which is 10 time larger than your normal recording area. And this only improves the write time, and does nothing for read time.

Hopefully they will make this into a usable model.
Hit the jump for the entire article. [InfoWorld via Gizmodo]

Western Digital Increases Storage On MyBook Drive

Today, Western Digital announced it will be giving a boost to its MyBook series of external hard drives. You can now get a MyBook World Edition II with two 750GB hard drives, making the total combined storage a staggering 1.5TB. The World Edition II drive can be setup to share contents via its gigabit-ethernet port and can store up to 180 hours of HD video.

If you’re looking for redundancy and reliable backups, you can partition one of the two 750GB drives and use the other as a RAID mirror. Don’t get too excited though, ’cause this drive is so hot, it’s ready to burn a hole right through your pocket. The World Edition II drive will cost $699 and is shipping today.

More after the leap. [MacNN]

Rumor: Wii Getting Hard Drive at E3

Boy is this rumor day or what?

This is a very shaky rumor, but Computer and Video games claims they have some info about an upcoming hard-drive add-on for the Wii.

They claim that since Neo Geo's Wii Virtual Console games are up to 330MB, there's not a whole lot of space on the console's current storage system to hold it. Therefore, Nintendo is going to release a hard-drive add-on.

Seems reasonable to me, but until there's some solid info to back this up with, we're going to call this a big fat rumor.

Check it out after the jump. [Computer and Video Games]

Two Hard Drives to Consider; Depending on Your Wallet

Summer is almost upon us, even though it doesn't feel like it in good ol' Indiana. If your hard drive is already full, getting a new one should not be a problem for most users anymore, because hard drive storage capacity is cheaper than ever.
At this point, you can buy a simple hard drive for as little as $40, and even high-capacity 500-GB drive prices are falling below $100.
At this point, the mainstream and sweet spot for most hard drives still are somewhere between 160 and 200 GB, and 160 GB still is plenty of storage space for your operating system and an average amount of data.
Outside of the quick "band-aid" solution of getting a super-cheap Hard Drive, lies the high capacity hard drives. Most people define drives over 500 GB as high capacity. Only Seagate and Hitachi offer hard drives with over 500 GB of capacity, but it is only a matter of a few months until other hard drive makers will follow with larger capacity drives.
If price is no object, Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 currently is the world's largest desktop hard drive. Its five platters spin at 7,200 RPM and the drive carries as much as 32 MB cache memory. Hitachi uses a Serial ATA/300 interface with Command Queuing to communicate with the host system. The drive's performance is excellent, although it is not the undisputed performance champion. Other 7,200 RPM drives perform similarly well, and there still is Western Digital's 10,000 RPM Raptor drive, which delivers a much quicker access time.
At $450, this drive is extraordinarily expensive, which can be justified by its uniqueness. If you're looking for maximum storage capacity, there is no alternative to the 7K1000.
But more than likely, cost is an object to people who also have to buy gasoline in the states. My recommendations for a lower price but nice quality drives is the Western Digital - WD1600AAJS. It is interesting because it offers 160 GB storage capacity on a single platter. This ensures very low heat dissipation, quiet acoustics and little moving parts that suffer from wear and tear. It has 8 MB cache, uses a Serial ATA/300 interface, supports Command Queuing and spins at 7,200 RPM. In addition, this drive starts at only $50 and has a three year warranty.
That my friends, is a great solution at an excellent price!