Our editing tools keep getting smaller and smaller! Trust us, we’re not complaining. That’s why we were so impressed with Western Digital’s new 7mm thin hard drive for Ultrabooks and other super-slim mobile workstations. This HDD comes in 320GB and 500GB varieties, meaning video producers will have tons of space to work on the road before they have to reach for  external drives. While solid state drives are preferred for speed, they still have yet to rival HDDs for sheer quantity of storage. We hope to see more of these types of ultra slim, high capacity drives.

Here’s an amazing story: A professor in Sweden, having placed his laptop outside of his apartment unattended, inevitably had his laptop stolen. That’s not the amazing part. The amazing part was that a week later, the professor received a USB stick in the mail – complete with all of his files backed up on it. Now you could call this a considerate thief (or at least more considerate than usual – since he did steal the laptop after all), but quite honestly with the price and size of USB memory these days, there was probably no consideration involved. Instead, with a 16 GB USB thumb drive going for 25 dollars or less, it was probably the least that guy felt he could do. The crazy part is that just a few short years ago, USB memory sticks were so expensive that if that same thief mailed one to the professor, it may have been good enough to put a down payment on a brand new laptop. Instead, even thieves are literally giving them away now.

With the onset of cheaper SSD drives, hard disk drive prices have taken a bigger nosedive than Mel Gibson’s career. In that same manner, Western Digital just announced the first 3 TB hard drive that comes in at only $240. Each platter on this massive drive can write up to 750 GB worth of data while supposedly running whisper quiet. That seems to be a pretty sensible price for a drive considering that just a year ago a 1 TB hard drive could come in at the same price. All things considered, it’s nice to know that the progress of technological innovation seems to be going as fast as ever – all at an affordable price.

Reprinted from a Western Digital press release:

Western Digital® today announced that it has commenced volume shipments of its 9.5 mm high, 2.5-inch notebook hard drive with 640 GB capacity. The WD Scorpio® Blue(TM) 640 GB hard drives utilize 320 GB-per-platter technology and are designed for mainstream notebook computers. The WD Scorpio Blue 640 GB is the highest capacity 2.5-inch hard drive available today in the industry-standard 9.5 mm, 2-disk form factor.
The new WD Scorpio Blue 640 GB drive has a 30 percent reduction in overall power consumption from the previous generation WD Scorpio Blue drive to achieve best-in-class power and performance(1), making it an ideal solution for notebook computers and other portable devices that require extended battery life and cool, quiet operation. Read the rest of this entry »