Western Digital today announced that its newest generation of the popular My Book Studio external hard drives are designed for use with Mac computers and Apple Time Machine. Now available with a 3 TB storage capacity, the new design features a brushed aluminum casing to match the appearance of a Mac computer, and also serves to keep the drive cool while in use. The aluminum exterior, combined with its WD Caviar Green drives, eliminates the need for an internal fan to reduce drive noise and extend the life of the drive. Although formatted for Mac computers, the My Book Studio external hard drives can also be reformatted for PCs.

The My Book Studio external hard drive includes all the features and benefits that have made it one of the favorites among creative professionals and Mac computer enthusiasts, including its fast and flexible FireWire 800/400 and USB 2.0 interfaces, user-controlled automatic backup software and drive management, password protection and hardware encryption. Shipping in capacities of 1 TB, 2 TB and 3 TB, the My Book Studio drive includes the WD Caviar Green series of internal hard drives with WD GreenPower Technology.

"WD has updated the design of its My Book Studio drive while providing natural cooling features delivered by the new aluminum enclosure," said Jim Welsh, executive vice president and general manager of WD's branded products and consumer electronics groups. "The drive will maintain all the features that are important to the creative community, including high speed FireWire 800 and adding large capacities up to 3 TB."

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Corsair, a worldwide designer and supplier of high-performance components to the PC gaming hardware market, today announced the first shipments of the Force Series GT line of solid-state drives.

The new Force Series GT is designed for enthusiasts who demand the fastest performance available. It uses the new SandForce SF-2280 SSD Processor, with native support for SATA 6Gb/s (SATA 3), combined with ONFI synchronous flash memory. Force Series GT SSDs deliver outstanding read/write performance and significantly faster system response, boot times, and application load times than SATA 2 solid-state drives, with out-of-box performance of up to 85K Random Write IOPS, read speeds of up to 555 MB/s, and write speeds of up to 525 MB/s. The use of synchronous flash memory makes the Force GT Series particularly adept at reading and writing non-compressible data, such as video and music files.

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Today, CDRLabs brings you an in depth look at OCZ's Agility 3 SSD. This cost-effective alternative to the popular Vertex 3 is based on the same SandForce SF-2281 controller and shares many of the same features including a SATA 6Gb/s interface and TRIM support. Despite its use of more affordable asynchronous NAND, the 120GB Agility 3 is capable of delivering up to 525 MB/s sequential read and 500 MB/s sequential write speeds as well as up to 50,000 4KB random write IOPS.

Introducing the MB882HX-1SB 2.5" SATA SSD Xpander Hybrid Adapter. Using a high speed 2.5" SATA SSD and a high capacity 3.5" SATA hard drive, you can combine them to create a new breed of species. Using our hybrid technology, we can take a moderate or 2nd generation 2.5" SATA SSD in combination with a mid to higher end 3.5" SATA hard drive which automatically creates "hybrid partition" and "storage partition". The "hybrid partition" doubles the capacity of the SSD drive and provides high performance in transfer rates. The storage partition gives you the remaining capacity of the hard drive* (the size of the 3.5" SATA hard drive minus "hybrid partition" size).

This is the perfect upgrade solution without purchasing an expensive high capacity SSD. The Xpander Hybrid Adapter doubles the sequential transfer rates of the hard drive exclusively in the hybrid partition, it is great for people who move, play or edit large media files. Such as a video editor, graphic designer, HD movie enthusiast that use applications like Adobe Photoshop, Sony Vegas and Windows Media Center that require large file loads / transfers. For editing, you can use the hybrid portion as a sketch drive; move the working files to it for fast editing. When you are done with the file we recommend moving the file to a RAID protected archive drive. The "storage partition" is perfect for non-important applications or files i.e. games, movies, music, or other media files.

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