MicroTechXP

Samsung has announced a low-cost 1 Terabyte HD, that will be available to consumers in June, at an affordable price of $199. With the growing desire for multimedia content, larger hard drives have become important to those of us who need such storage. Samsung has promised to keep specs that will be up to par with consumer needs, and this new drive will use 50% less power than it’s other 1TB models.
With the burden of managing HD’s today, Samsung could really take the lead with such a drive.[TechRadar]

We’d already heard about a possible price cut to the Xbox 360, but it looks like that might not be all that Microsoft has in store, as TrustedReviews is now reporting that the 20GB hard drive in the standard Xbox 360 model is about to get the boot in favor of a more spacious 60GB one. That word apparently comes from a “rock solid source,” who says that Microsoft wants to get it out the door by the end of its financial year, which comes at the end of June. TrustedReviews also goes into a bit of speculation, saying that Microsoft is “toying with the idea of introducing a new 360 SKU,” and that a model with a built-in Blu-ray drive would seem to be “the most logical conclusion,” although they say an external drive “makes sense too.” While that possibility obviously remains up in the air, TrustedReviews is about as confident as can be with the 60GB Xbox 360 news, saying that you can take it to the bank. [Engadget]

Alienware unveiled a high-definition media server this week, targeting homes with terabytes of digital content to store. Systems integrators, distributors and even home builders can now join the Alienware Digital Home Channel Program to be come an authorised reseller of the media server.
The Alienware High Definition Media Server integrates with home entertainment systems to create a centralised source for the storage, retrieval and distribution of digital content.Boasting 4TB of capacity, the server holds a lifetime’s worth of digital movies, music, photos and more, all of which can be sent to multiple points throughout the home.
View: The full story @ vnunet

Notebook PC disk storage leaps into the stratosphere today, hitting the half-terabyte mark with Hitachi Global Storage Technologies’ announcement of a 500GB 2.5-inch mobile hard drive. Due out in February 2008, the $400 Travelstar 5K500 drive wil l dramatically expand the capacity possible in today’s notebook PC designs.
Hitachi’s announcement makes it the largest capacity mobile 2.5-inch hard drive. Previous high-water capacity marks for 2.5-inch drives included Fujitsu’s 300GB drive and Toshiba’s 320GB drive. Hitachi’s jump to 500GB represents a whopping 36 percent increase in a single bound. (Hitachi also announced a 400GB version for $350.)

View: The full story @ PCWorld

Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun selling ridiculously well? It’s hard to believe that six years ago to this very day, the iPod was officially brought into the world at a Steve Jobs Special Event. In six years, we’ve seen 1,000 songs in your pocket become ever more affordable, and as hard-disk technology has progressed, so too has the number of songs an iPod can hold. 
We may have seen the demise of the FireWire connectivity in the iPod, the inclusion of less extras (such as a dock) with the players, but it seems to have done little to dampen demand for the ubiquitous music player. Who’d have thought that a little white music player, with a name inspired by a phrase from 2001: A Space Odyssey no less, would have powered the digital music revolution, and helped rejuvenate Apple beyond everyone’s wildest dreams. It’s been a fantastic 6 years for the iPod - but I daresay there’s plenty more in the pipeline that will make the next six years just as memorable.
After the break, there’s the video from the Special Event where it all began. Happy Birthday, iPod.

[tuaw]

Sounds like a schoolyard fight.

Speaking in a brutally honest interview with Gamasutra, Sony vice president of marketing for PlayStation Peter Dille questioned Microsoft’s business plan entering the video game industry, and more specifically the stability of the Xbox 360.

Palgn is reporting that Sonys vice president for marketing said,“I don’t want to be argumentative, but I take issue with Microsoft either having a long tail, or being profitable, because they’ve never done either. They’ve never made a dime in this business, number one, and number two, they’ve never had a tail. They’ve never been successful enough to have a tail! So the notion of a back half of the curve doesn’t exist for them,” Peter told Gamasutra.

Peter further commented on Sony’s success with the PlayStation brand, and the company’s ability to maintain a lasting console cycle, and how it contrasts with Microsoft, “They stopped the Xbox and I kind of feel for the guy that bought an Xbox the month before they said ‘we’re out of business, we’re moving on.’ The reason I get a little emotional about that is it’s in stark contrast to our approach. If we’ve got something that says PlayStation, we’re going to stand behind it for 10 years, and deliver games like God of War II in the 7th year of the cycle.”

And with plenty of momentum currently swinging in Sony’s favour with its strong E3 outing and the recent price-drop for the PS3, Peter ended by commenting on the Xbox 360, “With the Xbox 360 you’ve got an inconsistent design, some have a hard drive, some don’t, and none of them have Blu-Ray, and the HD DVD will be out of business in a matter of months. Is this a 10 year product? And by the way it doesn’t even work. Do they want to be selling it for 10 years and refurbishing them all for 10 more years? I don’t think that’s a 10 year product. You could disagree with me, or they could disagree with me, but I’d put that up against the PS3 any day.”

Certainly strong criticism, though it isn’t at all surprising considering that Microsoft has recently devoted over US$1 billion to deal with hardware problems with the Xbox 360.

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif.-June 25, 2007-Seagate (NYSE: STX) today announced 1 terabyte (TB) hard drives that deliver an industry-leading combination of capacity, performance and reliability for a wide range of enterprise and desktop PC applications as rampant growth of digital content continues worldwide.

This explosive growth of digital content in the home and the office is driving demand for massive amounts of hard drive storage. Businesses and consumers are generating and consuming staggering volumes of digital content - from high-definition video, music, blogs and podcasts, to Computer A ssisted Design (CAD) and other large graphics files, critical business records, archived emails, and database and file server data. Seagate is focused on delivering the industry’s most advanced hard drives to satisfy the world’s growing need for digital content, from the home to the hand to the car and the office.

“The need for high-capacity storage in enterprise networks and home entertainment centers is almost insatiable,” said John Monroe, a research vice president at Gartner. “Historians may consider the shipment of 1TB drives as a watershed event for the industry but users will consider such devices commonplace. We believe 1TB (and larger) drives will become ’standard equipment’ in, on or near virtually every television set in the world as well as in a variety of multi-user environments.”

As the industry’s only second-generation desktop and enterprise perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) hard drives, the Barracuda 7200.11 and Barracuda ES.2 deliver 1TB of capacity, 7,200-rpm spin speeds, average seek times of 8.5ms, caches up to 32MB and Seagate’s industry-leading five-year limited warranty. Seagate’s newest hard drives pack 1TB of data on just four discs to provide cool operating temperatures and low power consumption, which help extend drive life.

News Source: Seagate