[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.

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 ]

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?

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.

Wow, it seems that someone over at PCWorld.com couldn’t keep their mouth shut and announced the Alienware M17x a bit early. No matter, the most important thing is that you see what this baby has under the hood. It’s damn impressive and certainly allpowerful.

Most important, the new M17x notebook comes with a pair of 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280M GPUs. Impressive, yes. And also battery vampires. If the machine isn’t gaming, it could always fall back on the GeForce 9400M G1 GPU that’s also installed for better battery life.

A Core 2 Extreme quad-core CPU is at the core and can use up to 8GB of RAM 1333MHz DD3 to do its bidding. Plus, it can be config’d with either a RAID 0 or RAID 1 cluster over a 1TB drive or a 512MB SSD. Your choice. The rest is standard fare for a $1,799 + notebook including a Blu-ray drive, WiFi, 1920×1200 LCD, Displayport and HDMI out.

We’ve seen the big boy in person and it’s impressive. We just can’t wait to load some games on a review unit and take her for a spin.