Just to help you spend your paycheck today, we’ve got another CrunchDeal for you. Let’s say you’re running out of space, so you don’t have enough room to download Left 4 Dead 2. No problem, Newegg.com is selling a Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB drive for $70. This is the SATA 3.0Gb/s version, with the 4kb physical sectors. That makes it perfect for Windows 7, but no so great for XP. You can still use it, but it’ll require WD’s Align application. It’s still a great deal at $70, particularly if you have something like a NAS. The Western Digital Caviar Green drives actually run a little cooler then most other models, so you shouldn’t run into thermal issues.
[via Tech Report]
Just in case the 1TB drive in the TiVo Premiere isn’t big enough for you, WeaKnees is now selling two upgraded models with a bit more storage capacity. The TiVo authorized reseller has a 2TB and 4TB Premiere available for $849 and $1,149, respectively. That’s a lot of recording storage, boys and girls, and currently the only way to get a larger drive in the Premiere.
So far we haven’t heard of anyone else cracking the Premiere and installing their own larger hard drive. All it took in the previous TiVo generation was pulling the hard drive, plugging it into a PC along with the additional hard drive, and running a quick little program to allow the TiVo access to the second drive. Hopefully the hack for the Premiere is similar, but unless you have the skills needed to figure it out, your only route to a larger TiVo is through WeaKnees.
This isn’t WeaKnees first go at TiVo hacking and reselling. The company has been doing it since 2000 and TiVo’s lifetime service contract is available on all their models. Of course the TiVo warranty doesn’t apply, but the company has a great track record with its own service department and offers its own warranty.
Mr. Dave Zatz contacted the company and got this great pic of the company’s workspace. He also scored a 5% off coupon code that applies to modded and standard TiVo purchases.
Technology can be difficult to use, particularly things like home servers. Dane-Elec plans to make setting up your own home NAS easy, using their myDitto home network server. Installation is intended to be quick and painless, utilizing USB keys to set up the drive rather then the standard CD.
Honestly, I don’t see NAS devices as being that difficult to set up, but my experiences may be different from most users. The myDitto is a pretty standard NAS, with two drive bays, one of which is populated with a 1TB drive when the unit is purchased. The intention behind the myDitto is that you don’t have to install software to use it, just plug in one of the two included USB keys, and the software will start up and allow you to back up and restore files as needed. Admittedly, that could be considered easier then setting up a backup process on your home computer, but most the time you can just install the software, set up the schedule, and then forget about it. Full featured devices like the IoMega ix4-200d are just as easy to set up, it’s just a matter of perception.
Dane-Elec’s myDitto isn’t available yet, but it’s expected to retail for $279 in a 1TB configuration.
[via Gadgetwise]
By Chris Scott Barr
Technology is always being improved upon, usually meaning faster speeds and more storage coming in smaller packages. One of the latest technological milestones comes to us from Western Digital. The hard drive manufacturer has announced that they have crafted the highest capacity 2.5-inch drives. Utilizing 333GB platter technology, they were able to birth 750GB and 1TB drives. There’s only one small problem. Specifically a 3mm problem.
When you hear about a 2.5-inch hard drive, you’ll probably think that its primary function is to sit inside a laptop. Well if you were to crack open most laptops, you’ll find a drive that measures 2.5-inches long, and 9.5mm thick. Unfortunately these new drives from Western Digital are 12.5mm thick. This means that there are going to be a lot of notebooks that don’t accept these new larger drives.
Since these aren’t going to work in a lot of laptops, Western Digital says that they will be perfect for portable storage solutions. Unfortunately, I’m not thinking that they’ll perform all that well in this area either. First, the drive only spins at a paltry 5200RPM, meaning it will be slow as molasses. The cache is also a measly 8MB. Frankly, $190 for the 750GB and $250 for the 1TB drive are too expensive for that speed. I can get a 3.5-inch 1TB drive that spins at 7200RPM with a 32MB cache for around $80. It’s a little bigger, sure, but if you’re actually storing files large enough to require that much space, you’ll really notice the difference in speed.
[ Western Digital ] VIA [ Crave ]
Your pr0n collection is growing. You need more space! Luckily eCost has two great deals today, one for a 1TB drive for $84 and another for a 120GB SSD drive for $323.99. Freakout!
The OCZ 120GB Agility Series SATA II drive costs $324 – they now range from $350 to $500 – so this is a good deal. It should work on the new Unibody Macs.
The 1TB WD drive is just huge and it’s less than $100. Man alive: Did you ever think you’d be living in an era where you could buy a meal for more than the price of 1TB of data?
Quick, you wanna buy this Acer easyStore before the deal expires. Newegg is throwing in an extra 1TB drive for the price of nothing. That means you get a 2TB WHS for only $399. Awesome!
This deal requires that you actually install the drive yourself, but the easyStore is simple to work on. Just plop the hdd into one of the hard drive trays, and slide it in. After that, navigate to the WHS console to add the drive to the storage cluster. It’s that easy.
Question: Anyone else excited that 1TB drives are suddenly being thrown around as freebies? I am.
