Tech Tok

It’s plain to see that HD and Blu-ray are neck-and-neck, with Blu-ray changing price the most dramatically.
It may be that Blu-ray will take the price/GB lead from hard drives by summer.

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.

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.

Various sites are now advertising it for $1,300.
[Vistek]
[Aden Camera]
[ShopBot.ca]
[MostlyDigital.ca (for $1,126!)]
[Canoe.ca]
[Henrys]

Nifty.

Update [2008-11-25 8:16 PM]:
MostlyDigital now has it for $930, a drop of $200!

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	¢/Gig	xDVD
Blu-ray DL	25.0¢	7.8x
CD	20.5¢	6½x
DVD DL	11.0¢	3½x
Blu-ray	10.4¢	3¼x
Hard disk	8.9¢	2.8x
DVD±R	3.2¢	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.