The My Book line from Western Digital has been, let’s say varied. I can say from personal experience that these external hard drives have been as much of a godsend as they have been a pain in the ass since my current dead MyBook count is up to three. It’s nothing exponential but I would hope they got all the bugs out of their current 1 TB model before kicking out a 2 TB version prematurely.

Ms. “Fatty Hard Drive that no-one-wants-to-take-to-the-prom” includes some new handy network features such as remote and LAN access that should make office porn sharing so much easier. The latest model will go for an unnecessary $800 and promise of your first born to pointy little man.

[Via WD]

Richard Doherty, from the infamous Doherty family and Microsoft’s program manager for Media Entertainment Convergence, slung some proverbial poo at both the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray loving manufacturers and studios. With one quick exhale of his M$ paid voice, he claimed that both formats, as well as any other optical format that is out or may come out in the future will become obsolete in five years.

I showed up just in time to scream “No Shit!” and then ran away into my troll house to wait for the next obvious statement to be spewed from someone’s mouth. Dick went on to say that at Microsoft, they would rather HD content was not on a disc at all, and also added that for the time being they are supporting HD-DVD because it has better interactive content (and Toshiba makes their XBOX 360 hardware, there is an HD-DVD add-on for the 360, the PS3 has a Blu-Ray drive, and Microsoft hates Sony- but they didn’t mention these parts).

Now that the future of disc formats is settled, and before I go back to my trollhouse for some trollhouse cookies and such, I will make another outlandish claim about the future of tech: In five years, today’s processors will be considered ancient and slow when compared to current micro computer processors.

Let’s see how that one turns out.

[Via about-electronics]

Why George Hamilton? More like why not mother f-ing George Hamilton? During another late night edit, Fry’s decided to send me one of their weekly emails. Only this time something was in there worth checking out, behold: I nice bit of hard drive space for the price of one classy hooker, or fifty really cheap hookers.

On a personal note, everything I’ve bought from Fry’s, on and offline, has yet to fail me and I rank their awesomeness up there with newegg so if you’re actually looking for some quick and cheap external space, this looks like the way to go.

Click here for the direct link to the product page.

Hard drive aficionados rejoice! Check out the new Mercury On-The-Go 160GB portable hard drive brought to you by OWC.

Designed for the demanding professional in mind (or not), the Mercury On-The-Go portable hard drive is one of the faster portable hard drives on the market, running at a speedy 7200RPM. It’s also got interfaces for everything so never again choose between FireWire 800/400 and USB 2, plus it’s totally bus powered too. The thing is actually quite small for 160 gigs but the price sure isn’t - $279.99. However considering OWC is throwing in full retail versions of DataRescue III for OS X and NovaBackup for Windows, maybe it’s justified.

The prospect of having a HDD without a spinning platter is an enticing one. The pluses of no moving parts, and the lowered power consumption which is a huge buzzkill on laptops mean there really aren’t any huge downsides. Except for the fact that the sizes aren’t anywhere near where they need to be.

Some of us will probably never be able to ditch the old-school platter based HDD. The computer I’m at right now has two 250gb drives and a 500gb one. Suffice to say for the time being I won’t be stepping away from the standard storage methods.

But 160gb flash based HDD for a laptop? That’d be enough for most people, myself included. And that’s what Adtron recently announced. No prices listed in the press release, and I’m quite sure it’ll be crazy-expensive. But it’d be perfect for the military and it’s a harbinger (but a good one) of things to come.

Personally, for me it’s TiVO or nothing at all. But if you’re really stuck, or just like the lastest and greatest, check out the new line of HDTV’s from LG. They have a built in 160GB hard drive for recording all those HD channels we all love so much. There’s also a USB port to add an external drive.

There’s a few reasons why this isn’t a great idea. 1st, if the drive dies where does that leave you? Plus, is 160GB really enough? There’s a few different sizes, in both LCD (37″, 42″, and 47″) and Plasma (50″ and 60″). These puppies are gonna set you back though. Ranging in price from $2,650 to $9,435 for the 60″ Plasma.

[Ubergizmo]

If you feel that measly 200 gig hard drive isn’t enough, there’s hope. “Fujitsu was able to achieve a one-dimensional array nanohole pattern with a 25 nanometer pitch.”

Now what does that mean exactly? I’m not sure, I’m a bit rusty on my storage device production techniques since I stopped collecting cardboard boxes but this will supposedly allow for 3.5 inch drives to hold 5 terabytes in the, hopefully, near future. That’s more storage than I can shake a stick at and trust me, I’m a good stick shaker… that came out wrong.

[via DailyTech]