This Is the Largest SATA Drive In the World

It just looks like any other, but this WD Caviar Green is three terabytes, using 750GB-per-platter. At just $240, it comes just in time to upgrade my backup storage unit.


WD® Now Shipping the World's Largest Capacity SATA Hard Drives

WD Caviar® Green™ 3 TB Hard Drives Support the Continuing Demand for Increased Capacity in External Storage and Advanced PC Applications

LAKE FOREST, Calif., Oct. 19 /PRNewswire/ — WD® (NYSE: WDC) today announced that the company is shipping the world's largest capacity SATA hard drive. As the latest addition to its WD Caviar® Green™ family of SATA hard drives (photo), the new hard drives deliver up to a massive 3 terabytes (TB) of storage capacity on a single drive. WD is leading the industry in capacity for SATA hard drives by utilizing 750 GB-per-platter areal density and Advanced Format (AF) technology.

WD Caviar Green drives are an eco-friendly storage solution with WD GreenPower Technology™, which reduces power consumption by enabling lower operating temperatures for increased reliability and decreases acoustical noise for quiet operation. The WD Caviar Green 2.5 TB and 3 TB hard drives are designed for use as secondary external storage and next-generation PC storage in 64-bit-based systems.

Drives with capacities in excess of 2.19 TB currently present barriers for PC hardware, firmware and software. To satisfy the new set of requirements of which users must be aware to successfully integrate larger capacity drives, WD is bundling its WD Caviar Green 2.5 and 3 TB hard drives with an Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI)-compliant Host Bus Adapter (HBA), which will enable the operating system to use a known driver with correct support for large capacity drives. For more information on solving the 2.19 TB drive barrier, please see the WD information sheet at http://products.wdc.com/largecapacitydrives.

"WD remains a leader of hard drive capacity and low power innovation. With our WD Caviar Green drives, we enable energy-conscious customers to build systems with the highest capacities that deliver the optimal balance of system performance, ensured reliability and energy conservation," said Jim Morris, executive vice president and general manager of WD's client systems storage group. "Customers will be able to take advantage of this breakthrough capacity point now for secondary external storage in legacy 32-bit systems that run on Microsoft® Vista® or Windows® 7 platforms."

Price and Availability

WD Caviar Green 2.5 TB hard drives (model number WD25EZRSDTL) and 3 TB hard drives (model number WD30EZRSDTL) are available now in the U.S. at select resellers and distributors. MSRP for the WD Caviar Green 2.5 TB hard drive is $189.00 USD and the 3 TB hard drive is $239.00 USD. WD Caviar Green hard drives are covered by a three-year limited warranty. More information about WD Caviar Green hard drives may be found on the company's website here!

The Most Popular Phone in the World

Nokia has problems. Smartphone problems. Software problems. American problems. But to fully understand what's wrong, we've got to understand what's been right, or to put in another way, what's distracted Nokia. Meet the most popular phone in the world.

It has been said that more of the world's population has access to a cellphone than to a sanitary toilet. But of the planet's estimated 5 billion cellphone users, a privileged minority have smartphones; a paltry few, iPhones.

If you spend hours thumbing through pages of apps, scoffing at less-than-perfect software upgrades and grousing about screen resolution and pixel density, it's easy to forget that the very concept of a mobile phone is a miracle. It's a device that shrinks your day to day world into a single point, making you simultaneously accessible to and able to access nearly everyone you know, instantly and everywhere.

The Instant Coffee Straw

The Open It! instant-coffee-in-a-straw kind of makes me hurt inside. But it is very clever!

BlackBerry Style 9670 Clamshell

Running on OS 6.0, the flipper has two screens—one 2.7-inch QVGA on the inside, and on the outside there's a 2-inch QVGA. New messages and caller info is displayed on the outer, with the inner being the screen you'd mostly use. Sadly RIM hasn't used the Torch's touchscreen tech on the Style, but considering this phone is going to be firmly aimed at the young'uns, I imagine that was a sensible pricing decision.

There's a 5MP camera with flash, GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and comes with an 8GB microSD card. On sale October 31st at Sprint, it'll cost $100 after a $100 mail-in rebate.

Happy 25th Birthday, Nintendo Entertainment System!

It's not just Super Mario Bros. turning 25 this year. Today, October 18, marks the 25th anniversary of the Nintendo Entertainment System going on sale in the United States.

While a widespread release of the console wouldn't take place until 1986 (the same year it was released in Europe), it was in late 1985 at the FAO Schwarz in Manhattan, New York (as part of an advance market test) that the first of millions of the machines would pass over the counter of an American retailer.

The first games available were, in hindsight, some of the strongest launch titles in console history, including classics like Excitebike, Ice Climber, Duck Hunt and Baseball. The first consoles, meanwhile, were built by nice ladies.

Interestingly, according to 1UP, Nintendo's advertising boss at the time Gail Tilden reckons that first console was sold not to an American consumer, but to a representative of a "Japanese competitor".

The venerable old machine lasted ten years on the US market, with Nintendo ceasing production of the NES in 1995. In that decade it gave birth to many of gaming's most cherished franchises and characters, from Super Mario Bros to The Legend of Zelda to Metroid.

Metal iPhone 4 Cover Protects Your iPhone 4 Without the Bulk of a Case

The iPhone 4's glass backing is remarkably fragile—even more so than the other iPhone models. If you'd like to keep it protected without making the phone bulky with a case, consider replacing the back with this metal back cover instead.

For a mere $12, you can save your iPhone from accidents by replacing the back cover with this nice, beveled metal one. It still wouldn't be too casual about dropping your iPhone, but if you're prone to accidents and don't like big cases, this is another great way to go.

Inexpensive Solar Power Comes to Lego Mindstorms NXT

For $90 Dexter Industries will sell you a solar panel that provides enough juice to power an NXT control brick and one servo. Surely, Lego Mindstorms Mars missions aren't far behind.

The 9V/250mA panel seems to sync up with your Mindstorms kit easily enough, and if you want expand beyond that the company also offers a bunch of NXT-compatible capacitor packs, battery packs and a connector that lets builders daisy chain up to three panels on a single build.

Holy Military Secrets, Batman! Google Maps Revealed The Air Force's Hidden Weapon!

Thanks to Google Maps and an eagle-eyed Reddit user, we now know that the United States Air Force is hiding very special weapon on a military base in Okinawa, Japan. Oh yes, they're working with him.

Now can someone figure out where the Bat-Signal is hidden?

The PS3 Can Be Used As A Bed For Your Pe

SCORE! Finally! I've found a use for my PS3 Fat. Gut out its insides and turn it into a pseudo cage/pet bed for a ferret. Sounds like a plan. Now I'll need to get a ferret.

This gadget turned pet bed isn't as cute as the CRT Monitor Dog Bed but that's probably cause ferrets are rather ugly. I wonder if PETA or Sony approves of this.

The Newer, Smaller MacBook Air: The Storage Is the Secret?

An intriguing detail from AppleInsider about the new, 11.6-inch MacBook Air that's expectedto be revealed next week: It's not going to use a hard drive or an SSD for storage. It's going to use something else.

Instead, says AppleInsider's sources, it'll use "something described as an 'SSD Card'" for storage that's more like a stick of RAM than a traditional hard drive, a proprietary SSD alternative designed by Apple. It's almost like an SSD that's shed the bulk of a hard drive enclosure (since SSDs are basically just bundles of memory chips inside of a hard drive casing), but integrated, so it'll take up less room in the notebook.

It makes a lot sense, actually, to dump a hard drive enclosure's weight and bulk, particularly in a machine that's supposedly only 11.6 inches (and presumably even lighter than the original Air). It's a lot like when Apple ditched replaceable batteries in the MacBook Pros. Using only flash storage would also mean that the Air would be instant on, and more like an iPad in that regard.

Old Spice Guy Betrays Old Spice to Sell Windows Phone 7 in Australia?

Meme treachery! Viral video legend Isiah Mustafa appears in a new video, where he not-so-subtly alludes to the Windows Phone 7 launch, and an apparent ad campaign starring himself. I always thought advertising was a loyal business—how disillusioning.

While we will always be big fans of our pal Isiah for so kindly answering our tech query back in the Old Spice glory days, we wonder whether he'll be able to recapture the magic of his previous, heavily scented tenure. Is Windows Phone 7 sexy enough? Can he capture our hearts, and our libidos, with a tile-based interface? We have a feeling he'll find a way—and it will probably involve him ripping his shirt off a lot, and an ice cream cone filled with rubies or something.

Next Android Release To Be Named Ice Cream?

According to what ARM President Tudor Brown has been telling Forbes writer Elizabeth Woyke, the Android release following Honeycomb will be dubbedIce Cream. There's no confirmation from Google just yet, but the name would fit the pattern well enough.

But for fun, let's guess what other dessert names starting with the letter I Google might choose. Italian Cheesecake? Irish Cream Truffles?

Expensive, Yet Fast Describes Iomega's USB 3.0 SSD Flash Drives

USB 3.0 is fast. Faster than standard 7200 RPM disks can handle. So how do you make external storage faster to better fill up the transfer pipe? By putting an SSD inside.

As expected, these USB 3.0 SSDs are both costly and small, compared to your normal USB 3.0 disks. You're getting a 1.8-inch drive in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB sizes for $230, $400 and $850, respectively. Normal folks that only need external backup of their photos and music for traveling on the road will want to stick with non-SSD type drives, but pros and people who need fast drives to supplement their laptops will find these useful. And at 1.8 inches, they're about phone-sized and can fit nicely into pockets.

All three drives will be released in early November. Iomega tells me that these SSDs are about twice as fast as 7200RPM USB 3.0 drives, and 10 times as fast as USB 2.0 drives.

Korean Pizza Hut Commercial

If the video is not available in your country just search on Youtube—Korean Pizza Hut Commercial.

Put Your Camera on Canon's Prototype Dock and Watch it Magically Charge and Share

Well, it's inductive charging, not magic. But Canon's Cross Media dock looks like a particularly sweet implementation, letting you not only juice up to three cameras or camcorders sans wires, but suck down and share your pics and vids too.

As soon as your camera is placed on the prototype's surface—and don't expect it to be anything more than a prototype for at least a couple years—the box will pull over your content and send it to your TV via HDMI, where you can browse at your leisure. Sure beats having to mess with memory cards, no? Now just give us a universal version of this that works with any camera brand (and phones!).

Skype 5 Integrates Facebook Phonebooks, Makes Group Video Semi-Official

Windows: Skype is out with an official version 5, making the group video chat seen in previous sign-up betas an official option, and linking up with your Facebook account for status updating and quick calls to friends' Skype or landline numbers.

So this release, beyond the usual bug and performance fixes, mainly makes official the group video chat we found a bit wonky in a real-world test—although Skype still labels the group video function as "beta." The Facebook integration, at least from the contacts-with-Skype perspective, is pretty convenient. Now you just have to bug your friends to list their Skype names on Facebook.

New also to this version is an automatic call recovery feature, which you can set to automatically re-dial and reconnect calls whenever they drop out. It won't be a great idea for every situation, but very handy in the right circumstance.

Skype 5 is a free download for Windows users only. Presumably, Skype will push out the group video features to other clients, as it's a Windows-only feature at the moment.

This Bridge Looks Like It Can Fly to Space

The Paik Nam June Media Bridge project—in Seoul, Korea—is more than a kilometer long (0.67 miles). It has museums, libraries, and shopping malls, but what it really needs are anti-gravity engines so it could fly to orbit.

Those ramps are not engines of any kind, however. They just lead to gardens by the river and ship docks:

Each of the bridge's floors has horizontal gardens. The building uses solar panels for energy, as well as water from the river for climate regulation.

Japanese Scientists Teach World's Creepiest Robot to Sing

Meet HRP-4C, a singing "divabot" who mimics human singers' facial expressions and breath patterns. What a beautiful song she's singing! Can't wait to hear it again, in the nightmares we will have about her and her creepy corpse eyes.

Hoodies with Headphones Built Into the Strings

HoodieBuddies are a blend of fashion and technology that will save space in your pockets and prevent you from the dreaded tangled headphone cord situation. This normal looking hooded sweatshirts actually have headphone earbuds built right into the strings. The other end of the cord goes through the pocket, so you’d plug your iPod in via the pocket.

 Now you won’t have to carry around a pair of headphones to listen to music on the go. Sure you may seem a bit odd to look at dancing down the street with sweatshirt strings in your ears but people are probably looking at you funny anyway, you freak. They’re available soon for around $45.

Apple "Back to the Mac" Event Oct. 20: New OS X and MacBook Air?

Is that a Lion lurking in Apple's invite for a "Back to the Mac" event on October 20? It looks like a brand new version OS X. I hope they call it Simba. But what else?

The surprise could be a revamped MacBook Air. At least, that's what Daring Fireball thinks:

A "sneak preview of the next major version of Mac OS X", and, I'm just guessing here, the brand-new way-cooler MacBook Air.

The other update that is long overdue is iLife. However, it seems unlikely that they will introduce a new Mac OS X (which will take at least one hour to present), a new "way-cooler" computer, and iLife. We'll find out a week from today.