GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

Western Digital claims its newly-announced 2.5 TB and 3 TB Caviar Green hard drives are the largest capacity SATA drives on the market. But WD admits that these bigger drives need a little bit of help working on older systems.

“Drives with capacities in excess of 2.19 TB currently present barriers for PC hardware, firmware and software,” according to WD’s press release. To get around these barriers, WD is bundling its new drives with an Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI)-compliant Host Bus Adapter (HBA), which will pair legacy operating systems with a driver than can support bigger drives.

The 2.19 TB limit isn’t a problem for 64-bit versions of Windows 7 or Vista, OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard, or many versions of Linux. Really, the problem is Windows XP.

XP (whether in 32- or 64-bit) runs into problems because of its legacy BIOS and Master Boot Record (MBR) partition table, which it in turn carried over from earlier versions of Windows. These allow XP to address a maximum only 2^32 logical blocks at 512 bytes each — for an upper bound of 2.19 TB.

Any 32-bit system (even one as new as Windows 7) has trouble booting into a drive with a capacity over 2.19 TB, but they can work around that limitation for a secondary internal drive. XP can only use these large drives as external drives with special USB firmware that either presents it as a single drive using larger sector sizes or as more than one smaller drives to the host (this is how Seagate’s 3 TB external drive works) — or using an internal HBA card, which does basically the same thing.

Still confused? WD has a complete list of operating systems, motherboards and USB bridges that it supports for its new large-capacity drives. Meanwhile, if you’re ready to roll and the old 2TB drives just weren’t enough storage, the new drives are available now. The 2.5 TB is $189 and the 3 TB hard drive is $239.00.

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Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

More MacBook details are dragging themselves from the fertile pond of Apple rumors, this time flapping their wet, scaly tentacles onto the desks of MacNN.

MacNN’s source confirms the dropping of FireWire in the consumer MacBooks, which makes sense. The only thing most MacBook buyers need FireWire for is to hook up an external drive, and those all come in USB flavor anyway. It will be a shame to use the rather useful FireWire Target Mode, though, and the rather less useful (and infinitely more finicky) FireWire networking.

The dual GPUs in the MacBook Pro will apparently be a mixture of a dedicated graphics processor and an integrated chip sat on the motherboard. The Pro notebook will also be getting faster RAM (DDR3/1,066GHz), a top processor speed of 2.8GHz and, best of all, a longer-life battery, perhaps a nine-cell design instead of the current six-cell (hey, if MSI’s Wind is getting one, why not the Mac?)

MacNN also claims that the the Pro will see a new video-out socket which looks something like an HDMI-out port. We’d hazard a guess that Apple has somehow shoehorned both a Mini DVI and an HDMI capable output into one socket, which means that we’ll have another couple of proprietary $30 adapters to buy.

Stay tuned. We’ll know for sure come 10AM (5PM GMT), or five hours from now.

Specs, photos of MacBook Pro up to 2.8GHz [MacNN]

Illustration: Jesus Diaz/Gizmodo

Posted under Gadget Reviews