Showing posts with label Western. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Western. Show all posts

Monday, July 15, 2013

Western Digital ships 7mm WD Blue, world's thinnest 1TB hard drive

WD® DELIVERS WORLD'S THINNEST 1 TB HARD DRIVE

New, 7 mm Slim 2.5-inch Hard Drive Delivers Industry's Highest Capacity Storage Giving Customers a High Capacity Option for Thin and Light Mobile Devices

IRVINE, Calif. – June 3, 2013 – WD®, a Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) company, today announced it is shipping the world's thinnest 1 TB hard drive with its new 2.5-inch WD Blue™ 7 mm hard drive. Offering OEMs, channel integrators and consumers a unique storage solution for thin and light systems, slimmer notebooks, as well as compatibility with the industry-standard 9.5 mm drive slots of mainstream notebooks, the WD Blue hard drive family, in capacities from 320 GB to 1 TB in the 7 mm height, now provides a singular option of thin design and high capacity storage.

"Users with large portfolios of content no longer need to sacrifice capacity when buying and Ultrabook or upgrading to a thin and light notebook," said Matt Rutledge, Vice President and General Manager for client storage products at WD. "This most compact 1TB hard drive to-date offers manufacturers of systems an upsell path for their customers who will now be able to choose systems offering both sleek design and high capacity.

"Intel is introducing its fourth-generation Intel Core processor family (codenamed Haswell) to deliver faster and more efficient performance to both desktop and notebook platforms, with significant gains benefitting portable systems" said Roger Bradford, Capabilities Marketing Manager at Intel. "The release of the WD Blue 7 mm hard drives offers a new level of storage capacity that further enriches the computing experience for users of Ultrabooks, All-in-Ones and other thin and light PCs."

"With the release of WD's 1 TB capacity in a 7 mm drive height, Acer customers now have the best of both options and no longer have to choose between the lightness of thin, sleekly designed systems or those with high capacity storage," said Tiffany Huang, BG President, PC Global Operations at Acer Incorporated.

"As ASUS develops new super-slim solutions, reliable storage options such as the WD Blue 7 mm 1 TB hard drive provide us with an ideal capacity to offer our customers," said S.Y. Shian, Corporate Vice President and General Manager of NB Business Unit at Asus. "WD has eliminated the capacity limits heretofore endured by thin and light personal computers while keeping the reliability and data-protection of a traditional hard drive."

Features of the WD Blue 7 mm hard drives include:

- Shock Tolerance – WD's ShockGuard™ technology protects the drive mechanics and platter surfaces from shocks.

- Cool and quiet - WD's exclusive WhisperDrive™ technology enables quiet performance.

- StableTrac™ – The motor shaft is secured at both ends to compensate for system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations which enables consistently higher performance.

- Dual Stage Actuators – Leveraged from enterprise-class drives, dual stage actuators utilize two actuators to improve positional accuracy over the data track(s). The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy.

- Reliable – WD's SecurePark™ parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down, and when the drive is off. This ensures the recording head never touches the disk surface resulting in improved long term reliability due to less head wear, and improved non-operational shock tolerance.

- Compatibility Tested - WD performs tests on hundreds of systems and a multitude of platforms in its FIT Lab™ and Mobile Compatibility Lab to give customers confidence that drives will work in specific systems.

Price and Availability

Shipping now through select distributors and resellers, the new 1 TB WD Blue 7 mm 2.5-inch mobile hard drive is covered by a two-year limited warranty. MSRP for the 1 TB, model#: (WD10SPCXX) is $139.00 USD. Additional information about WD Blue mobile hard drives and limited warranty terms may be found on the company website at http://www.wd.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=800.


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Thursday, April 11, 2013

Western Union Mulls Using Bitcoin

Wu2013-04-02 16:31:37 UTC

Western Union, a 162-year-old firm that made its name by offering telegraphs, is considering embracing the digital age by accepting Bitcoin and other types of digital payment methods, according to a report.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the company is interested in getting a slice of online transactions like gaming and telephony. "If you want to top up a Skype account or add value to an online gaming platform, those are the kinds of partnerships I’m working to develop,” David Thompson, EVP of global operations and CIO at Western Union told the WSJ. Western Union reps could not be reached for further comment.

The company, which stopped offering telegrams in 2006, provides person-to-person money transfers and lets consumers pay their bills online. In 2008, Western Union also introduced a mobile service that enabled cash-to-mobile, mobile-to-cash and mobile-to-mobile transfers. In the former cases either the send or receiver has to visit a physical Western Union location. With the latter, a mobile-enabled account can send funds to a recipient with a mobile-enabled account.

Bitcoin, an Internet-based currency system, was introduced in 2009. The value of Bitcoins are held in check by a process known as mining. Under the system, computers connected to the network (known as miners) aim to find the solution to a certain mathematical problem. If they successfully solve the problem, a new block is created. Until December 2012, the value of each block was 50 BTC (Bitcoins). Every four years, the value of solving a block is halved. Though it's unlikely that Bitcoin could become a de facto world currency, the idea recently gathered some steam when a Bitcoin-based ATM opened up in economically troubled Cyprus.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Swanksalot

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