Western Digital Releases 2TB Thunderbolt-connected My Book VelociRaptor Duo

Subject: Storage | August 30, 2012 - 10:49 PM | Allyn Malventano
Tagged: western digital, WD, VelociRaptor, my book, duo

We took a look at the 1TB VelociRaptor back in April. Well now Western Digital went and stuck a pair of them into an oversized My Book chassis, connected it via Thunderbolt, and voala:

This is a nice little external storage device that can be configured as a RAID 0 or 1. My Book Duos can even be daisychained to support RAID 10! Daisychaining allows up to four My Book Duos to be connected simultaneously. The price is a bit steep, but seems to be in-line with other Thunderbolt enabled products. More to follow once we get a sample in for review!

A lot for storage but little in the way of a warranty

Subject: General Tech | August 9, 2012 - 01:12 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: hdd, toshiba, western digital, 3tb, Warranty, sad

As has been mentioned previously on PC Perspective the current trend of HDD manufacturers reducing the length of warranty is not being well received, though with only three manufacturers left consumers have little choice in the matter.  At least with Western Digital, you are more likely to get a 3 to 5 year warranty than you are a single year.  That negative feedback obviously hasn't fazed Toshiba, who are using the WD plants they purchased earlier this year to manufacture 1.5, 2 and 3TB HDDs, 3.5" in size and available in both 7200 and 5400RPM models and offering 1 year of warranty.  In short, a factory which was previously capable of providing a 5 year warranty on spinning disks for your long term storage now offers a shorter warranty than the SSD manufacturers who are poised to replace them.  The Inquirer offers more on this depressing topic here.

"Toshiba, the distant third vendor in the storage industry, was given the chance to buy part of Western Digital's hard drive business when it wanted to appease regulatory bodies to approve its purchase of Hitachi. With some of Western Digital's plants, Toshiba is now set to launch a range of 3.5in hard drives topping out at 3TB."

Here is some more Tech News from around the web:

Tech Talk

• Kaspersky spots Zeus for BlackBerry @ The Register
• Kaspersky Lab warns of noxious ‘Gauss’ financial trojan @ The Inquirer
• Intel to try out wireless charging technology in ultrabooks and smartphones in 2H13 @ DigiTimes
• NASA's $2.5bn Curiosity rover: An Apple PowerBook on wheels @ The Register
• Buffalo Air Station AC1300 N900 802.11ac Wireless Router Review @ Legit Reviews
• How to Make Your Own Cat5e Network Cable @ Techgage
• NO!SE: The Game of Silence – win awesome prizes! @ Kitguru
• Win a Patriot Viper 3 Memory Kit @ Hi Tech Legion

WD Red drives *do* support TLER...

Subject: Storage | August 3, 2012 - 02:25 PM | Allyn Malventano
Tagged: western digital, WD, TLER, red, raid, hdd

This morning I received a tweet about WD Red drives not supporting Time Limited Error Recovery. TLER is the feature which allows a RAID comprised of Reds to much more gracefully handle drive failures and/or read errors. It's carried down from enterprise drives like the RE4 and RE4-GP.

I'm posting this quick note here to let the masses know that the Red drives *do* in fact support TLER. It's a primary component of NASware - the NAS aware firmware that drives the Reds. Here's the official reply I received from Western Digital:

WD does enable intelligent error recovery controls, which is not the same as a desktop drive.  WD's exclusive NASware technology is built in each WD Red drive, which reduces the concern with using desktop drives in a RAID environment.
More info on details of NASware can be found here:  http://www.wd.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=810

Western Digital has assured me they are tracking down where the miscommunication occurred.

Western Digital releases 'Red" series of SOHO NAS hard drives

Subject: Storage | July 10, 2012 - 08:04 AM | Allyn Malventano
Tagged: western digital, wdc, red, NAS, hdd, Hard Drive

** Note ** - Full review has been posted HERE!

Today Western Digital launches their Red series of hard drives. These are basically Caviar Greens that are specificially tuned to operate in small RAID configurations - namely home and small business NAS solutions containing up to 5 drives. These drives carry over some of the features present on Western Digital's Enterprise lines while adding a few of their own.

We got samples of the Red in yesterday evening, so instead of going on with conjecture derived from the news post, I'll hit you with the new features and a bit of my initial impressions from our early benching:

• Extremely quiet operation thanks to a new dynamic balancing mechanism built into the spindle motor hub. The drive essentially re-balances itself on-the-fly as temperatures change, etc.
• Seeks are equally quiet - quiet enough that a bunch of these doing random access outside of an enclosure would barely be audible from only a few feet away.
• Great sequential throughput (~150MB/sec at start of disk, ramping down to ~65MB/sec at the end).
• Random access times in the 20ms range - likely due to the very quiet seeking mechanism.
• Red Series drives will all be advanced format (i.e. internally addressed by 4k sectors).
• Reds will all be 1TB/platter, available in 1, 2, and 3TB capacities. This gives similar throughput figures regardless of capacity purchased.
• 3-year warranty, with a 24/7 support hotline specifically for Red owners.
• Red drives feature a QR code on the label to assist with any support issues down the road.

I'm not kidding about the quiet operation. The only sound the Red makes is reminiscent of a DVD spinning at low speed, in a sound deadening enclosure. There is no motor whine whatsoever and the head actuator is nearly inaudible. I have to almost lay my head on the drive to tell it is seeking at all.

A full review with all of the gory details will be up later today. For now I leave you with the WD press release after the break, along with this nifty QR to get you more info on the Red Series:

*note - the QR page may not yet be live.

Podcast #207 - Western Digital N900 HD Router, NVIDIA GT 640, Falling SSD prices, and more!

Subject: General Tech | June 21, 2012 - 04:03 PM | Ken Addison
Tagged: western digital, podcast, nvidia, N900, kepler, Intel, gt640, gpu, cpu, amd

PC Perspective Podcast #207 - 06/21/2012

Join us this week as we talk about the Western Digital N900 HD Router, NVIDIA GT 640, Falling SSD prices, and more!

You can subscribe to us through iTunes and you can still access it directly through the RSS page HERE.

The URL for the podcast is: http://pcper.com/podcast - Share with your friends!

• iTunes - Subscribe to the podcast directly through the iTunes Store
• RSS - Subscribe through your regular RSS reader
• MP3 - Direct download link to the MP3 file

Hosts: Ryan Shrout, Jeremy Hellstrom, Josh Walrath and Allyn Malvantano

This Podcast is brought to you by MSI!

Program length: 1:17:19

Program Schedule:

1. 0:00:58 Introduction
2. 1-888-38-PCPER or podcast@pcper.com
3. http://pcper.com/podcast
4. http://twitter.com/ryanshrout and http://twitter.com/pcper
5. 0:01:58 Join us for some cool live events this week! - http://pcper.com/live
6. 0:05:15 Western Digital My Net N900 HD Router Review
7. 0:19:00 Low-End Laptop Graphics Solution Comparison: Five Options Go Head-To-Head
8. 0:22:03 Galaxy GeForce GT 640 GC 1GB DDR3 Review - GK107 is no GK104
9. 0:30:17 This Podcast is brought to you by MSI!
10. 0:31:00 Modest announcements at the last day of the AFDS
11. 0:34:20 Western Digital and Seagate doomed to be marked as bad sectors?
12. 0:37:45 How did we suddenly move past the $1/GB on SSDs?
13. 0:40:25 SK Hynix to acquire Link_a_Media Devices for $248 million
14. 0:44:30 Microsoft Surface announced, tablet to compete with iPad
15. 0:52:40 Intel renames Larrabee to Xeon Phi
16. 1:01:00 Hardware / Software Pick of the Week
    
    1. Ryan: Pegasus R4 Thunderbolt Unit - pushing 660 MB/s with RAID-0
    2. Jeremy: I change my mind … This is what I was promised!!
    3. Josh: I love the price drop!
    4. Allyn: Jawbone HD + The Nerd
17. 1-888-38-PCPER or podcast@pcper.com
18. http://pcper.com/podcast
19. http://twitter.com/ryanshrout and http://twitter.com/pcper
20. Closing

Are Western Digital and Seagate doomed to be marked as bad sectors?

Subject: General Tech | June 15, 2012 - 01:01 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: Hard Disk, Seagate, western digital, fud, hdd

There are quite a few things in the industry to speculate on, from Microsoft's intimating a 'big new thing' next Monday to AMD and the HSA's plans for the future of the industry, but if you want to go for the big one then it is the hard drive industry you should be following.  The most recent sign that something big is going on would be the change in warranty length on consumer drives from the two remaining players, both of which now offer a 1yr warranty.  That is a vast reduction from previous 3yr and 5yr warranties and while it does not necessarily imply these drives will fail any faster it does mean they offer shorter warranties than their competition, the SSD.  This could convince a lot of people that paying $1/GB for an SSD is not really that bad of a deal and you can only expect that price to fall, especially on larger sized SSDs.

Also consider the fact that there are only two major HDD manufacturers left, Seagate and Western Digital.  This defragmentation of the industry has been going on for quite a while now, resulting in those two manufacturers owning their competitions resources and IP and pretty much being able to determine what the market will provide and at what cost to the consumer.  That has lead to the rather counter-intuitive profits that these two, especially Western Digital, made over the past year.  You would not expect a company which lost its manufacturing capabilities to the Thai floods to see a 230% increase in profit, yet that is exactly what happened from March 2011 to March 2012.  Seagate held their first place spot over the same time period, with higher volume sales contributing to that success with their prices only rising 20% instead of the 40% they threatened during the supposed supply difficulties.  

The HDD market seems to be on its way out, not just because ultraportable devices chose SSDs over HDDs but also because the average consumer has come to the realization that while having a few terabytes of storage is nice for long term storage they really do not need it, especially on a device which does not have long term support.  The Inquirer smells something foul in the air and comments on this topic here.

"Seagate, Western Digital and to a lesser extent Toshiba are starting to see free market economics - or as close as it gets - show their strategy of consolidation and profiteering. With the number of solid state disk (SSD) in the low teens, prices are falling steeply while hard drive makers rely on artificially high prices and shorter warranties to make a quick buck."

Here is some more Tech News from around the web:

Tech Talk

• The other side of Computex @ The Tech Report
• Inside the “Card-That-Unlocks-All-Cable-Channels” Scam @ Hardware Secrets
• Microsoft's $1bn Yammer gobble gabble blabbed by insiders @ The Register
• Skype 4.0 For Linux Now Available @ Slashdot
• Intel to hold ultrabook cost-reduction meeting with Taiwan supply chain makers in July @ DigiTimes