Western Digital announced today that they are closing one of their 3 manufacturing plants in Thailand, and laying off around 5% of their total workforce — roughly 2500 people. In addition to the closure, they are cutting back production at their other fabrication plants, and reducing compensation to upper management.

This is a reaction to lower then expected third quarter revenues, and was not entirely unexpected. I just hope we don’t end up having to bail them out too.

For months now, I have been trying to play .MKV and other video files on my living room front projector. At first I tried to connect a laptop directly to the TV. But this didn’t always work, the audio was crappy, and it was awkward to have a laptop connected to the projector.

I started using my XBOX 360 to play video files. At first I wanted to stream the files across my network. This worked every once in a while, but mostly it was an exercise in frustration. And I got miserable fast forward and rewind capability because of the network bottleneck.
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If you like to hoard stuff digitally, you’ll love the price on this two-terabyte external hard drive from Newegg. It’s the Western Digital My Book for $249 with free shipping. That’s cheap! Just think of all the questionable content you could store on it! Set it up striped as RAID 0 or go for broke and mirror it as RAID 1.

And remember, it looks like a book so you can put it amongst the other books on your bookshelf and would-be thieves and snooping spouses will be none the wiser!

Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition [Newegg.com via dealnews]

Just in time for the economic downturn and holidays, Drobo has announced they’ve slashed prices on their 2TB and 4TB packages. Many thanks to Western Digital for providing the Drobo folks with 1TB GreenPower drives on the cheap. The price of the driveless Drobo remains the same, but the 2TB bundle is now $749 while the 4TB giant is $999. But, Drobo didn’t think that was good enough, so beginning today they’re offering a $50 MIR until December 1. That brings the cost of the driveless Drobo to $449 and I think you can do the math for the bigger bundles.

Drobo for the holidays

Like Seagate, Western Digital doesn’t see a market to enter in the form of SSDs right now. They’re open to it, and eventually will make their mark, but at the moment it’s not compelling to them. I love this quote from one of their head marketing guys that makes it sound like the company runs on clockwork:

Western Digital enters markets that exist, announces products when they are available, and runs a tight model with opportunities greater than resources such that we take a controlled, methodical, sequential, incremental approach to product portfolio expansion.

Mr. Rutledge then rakishly added, “In bed.”

Seriously, though, it looks as if spinning hard drives are going to be around for a good long time yet for certain price points; although we think of them as being volatile and archaic, they’re really unbelievable little machines and I don’t blame companies like WD and Seagate for wanting to protect their investments.

Western Digital must think they have something special with the WD TV HD Media Player to enter this market so late. The WD TV HD reportable plays back up to 1080p media files off an attached USB thumb drive or USB HDD. No word on wether the supplied software supports popular HD file formats like MKV or if you must re-encode source material into an Western Digital approved codec. It might be wise to wait until the early adaptors play with the device before you plop down $129 of your hard earned cash though. 
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That Apple eliminated FireWire 400 from the MacBook Pro wasn’t lost on Western Digital, which just original story titlereleased a FireWire 800 version of the My Passport Studio portable hard drive. The HDD, which tops out at 500GB, is designed for mobile professionals—photographers and videographers—who need to carry large files with them. It weighs less than seven ounces, not that the average person has any idea of how to conceptualize that.

Of course, the drive also works just fine over USB and FireWire 400, but that interface will be dead soon enough.

She costs $250 for the 500GB model and $230 for the 400GB model, which means you’d be a damn fool not to spring for the larger one.

Western Digital’s Caviar Green desktop hard drives have hit gen 2 and the eco-friendly drives are still the most quiet, power efficient and coolest drives on the market. Based on a 333GB/platter, the new drives have 32MB of cache and are available in sizes ranging from 500GB to 1TB. These are some fancy features of the Caviar Green drives in case you’re interested:

IntelliPower(TM) – A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate
and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power
savings and solid performance. Additionally, GreenPower drives consume
less current during startup allowing lower peak loads on systems as
they are booted.

IntelliSeek(TM) – Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power
consumption, noise, and vibration.

NoTouch(TM) ramp load technology – Designed to ensure the recording
head never touches the disk media resulting in significantly less wear
to the recording head and media, as well as better drive protection in
transit.

The 1TB model is a mere $219. That’s cheap for a desktop hard drive, right?

Western Digital just announced the ShareSpace, a network-attached storage solution aimed at the home or small biz user. The 2 or 4 Terabyte NAS hooks up like every other NAS on the market through a gigabit connection and serves up your wares throughout the network. A front USB port allows users to dump other USB-based drives into the massive RAID array with just a touch of a button.  Western Digital even included built-in backup software and an iTunes server. Interested? The 2 or 4 TB drives are currently available and going for $699 and $999 respectively.

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Sure you do. Who doesn’t need 500GB worth of space? Starting today you can get one of Western Digital’s My Passport portable USB drives in capacities ranging from 120GB to 500GB. The half terabyte drive retails for $200 or $220 depending on the model.

Anyone averse to keeping things in “the cloud” can rest easy, as companies like Western Digital show absolutely no signs of stopping the weed-like growth of hard drive storage capacity. Today, Western Digital begins shipping its “Scorpio Blue” 500-gigabyte notebook hard drive. It’s got 8MB of cache, a 5400 RPM spin speed, 12 ms access time, and up to 3-gigabytes per second transfer speed over SATA (there’s an EIDE version available as well). The drive will retail for around $220.

[via Electronista]

A few months ago Devin told you about the new VelociRaptors from Western Digital. What he neglected to mention (probably because no one knew it yet) was a significant design flaw [Devin here: can't believe I missed that, it's right in the picture]. When the drive was placed in its drive sled, the power and serial connections were in weird spots instead of the lower corner where they usually are. IT peeps were upset because this caused the fast drives not to play nicely in some server setups.

Since everyone was screaming about the situation online, WD has announced a new version. Pretty much all they had to do was move the PCB. Why didn’t they do that the first time?

Frustrated VelociRaptor fans will be happy to hear that the new drives are out now.

Update: WD tells us that the new version was planned when they released the original and that the unusual placement of the SATA/power connectors was not a design flaw. Thanks for letting us know, WD, but whether you call it a design flaw or not it’s still a weird place to put the things and there’s no mention of an upcoming revision in the press release. Personally, I’d be happy to make do with either one; my aging system hard drive could do with an upgrade and I could care less if it’s ports are in the usual spots. What really matters is the performance and VelociRaptors are top of the HDD dogpile right now.

We at CrunchGear know that you have a huge pornography collection. Sure, it’s not regular pornography – it’s furry porn – and by “you” we mean “me, John Biggs,” but I’m in such deep denial that I equate all my failings to everyone else. That said, we would like to offer you/me 2 terabytes of pornography storage as part of our 10 Days of CrunchGear giveaway. Behold, friends, the Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition 2TB monster drive :

Secure your vital data with WD’s My Book Mirror Edition dual-drive storage system with RAID Mirroring. With RAID-based continuous data protection, automatic data backup software, and user-serviceability, this is the perfect backup system for your irreplaceable data.

RAID – for when you don’t want to lose your pornography.

How do you win?

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I’m sure there are plenty of WD hard drives in RAID configurations all around the world, but now they’re stepping into the arena for reals with a consumer-oriented RAID array. They’re all the rage, these days, after all – what with Drobo, the HP MediaSmart, the Newertech setup I mentioned a week ago, and I suppose you could even rig up this thing to be an array.

It comes in 1TB and 2TB flavors, $290 and $550 respectively. You can either mirror or stripe, your choice, and they run on Western Digital GreenPower drives so they’re ostensibly low-power. WD has a couple other similar options, but I think this is the most consumer-accessible one. Its pricing is more aggressive as well, although as always building your own is cheaper.

Kind of a chubby-looking thing isn’t it? Cute, though.

We’re still very much in a storage transitionary period here, what with platter-based HDDs being so big and affordable and SSDs creeping up on them both in size and performance-wise. Western Digital isn’t giving up on the HDD yet — they think there’s still a little bite left in that old hound. But they’re giving it a boost.

WD is hard at work on a freaky new hard drive, a derivative of its Velociraptor line, except these new ones will be spinning at a hot 20,000RPM, hopefully to bring their read/write speeds in line with SSDs. And they’re supposed to be silent. The idea is that it’s a 2.5″ drive in a 3.5″ enclosure, so they can put extra shock and sound dampeners in there. No one really knows much about these things, but we’ll keep you updated.