New WD Passport Drive .. with **FireWire 800**

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008
WD Passport Studio
WD Passport Studio

Woo, there’s a new WD Passport drive (the drives we use at gaming on Friday nights), and not only is this one bigger (500 GB), but it also sports a FireWire 800 port. It’s called the Passport Studio.


WDTV
WD Media Player

Also new from Western Digital is an HD Media Player. [buy.com link]

Alas, Costco Canada doesn’t seem to have any of this new WD stuff yet.

Cost of storage vs DVD: BD=16x, CD=6½x, HD & DVD-DL=5x

Friday, May 30th, 2008
Just a quick followup note from a thread I did on Twitter yesterday on the prices of a Gigabyte of storage on various media.

DVD’s are still the king at just over 3¢ per gig:

Kind¢/GigxDVD
Blu-ray DL25.0¢7.8x
CD20.5¢6½x
DVD DL11.0¢3½x
Blu-ray10.4¢3¼x
Hard disk8.9¢2.8x
DVD±R3.2¢1x

I find the dual-layer DVD vs hard drive equivalence fascinating, especially after talking with Iain yesterday about the eSATA ports on my Mac Pro’s motherboard.

Sources for prices are Canada Computers and Fortune Computers.

Update: per my comment below, DVD-DL updated from 17¢/GB (5x) to 11¢/GB (3½x).

Update: per another comment, Blu-ray updated from 51¢/GB (16x) to 20¢/GB (6½x).

Update: another comment: Blu-ray updated from 20¢/GB (16x) to 12¢/GB (3¾x).

Update 2009-09-09: another comment: Blu-ray updated from 12¢/GB (16x) to 10.¢/GB (3¼x), added Blu-ray DL. Also updated hard disk from 17¢/GB to 8.9¢/GB as per current prices of 1.5 TB drives.