OWC have created a new portable harddrive that it claims to be the worlds first “quad interface”. The BUS powered drive can be connected to a PC using four methods which are eSATA, USB 2.0 and two Firewire 800 ports with support for Firewire 400.

The new drives come in several capacities which include a 1TB, 500GB, 200GB and a 640GB model. Some of the models run hard drives while others run SSDs. See the chart below along with pricing to see whats what.

OWC Quad-Interface Portable Hard Drives

250GB HDD at 5400RPM with 8Mb Cache – $119.99
320GB HDD at 5400RPM with 8MB Cache – $129.99
500GB HDD at 5400RPM with 8MB Cache – $154.99
640GB HDD at 5400RPM with 8MB Cache – $189.00
1.0TB HDD at 5200TPM with 8MB Cache – $299.99

320GB HDD at 7200RPM with 16MB Cache – $144.99
500GB HDD at 7200RPM with 16MB Cache – $189.99

OWC Quad Interface Portable SSD Drives

50GB – $299.99
100GB – $469.99
200GB – $849.99

Available from MacSales and Amazon.

Via: OhGizmo

OWC Quad-Interface Portable 1TB Drive

Need a more efficient heat sink? Try a carbon nanotube. Artificial muscle? Nanotubes. Space Ladder? Self-cleaning windows? Incredibly small bowl of soup? You get the picture. What can't carbon nanotubes do? We're not sure just yet, but even power generation is not beyond their grasp. Apparently when you coat the wee straws in butane and light one end on fire it creates a thermal wave, propelling electrons along to create a current. It's not a lot of current on a single smoldering tube, but scale things up and the potential is said to be 100 times greater than an equivalent weight lithium-ion battery. Of course, you don't have to light a LiOn cell on fire to get the juice out of it (usually), but we're guessing scientists will create a way to make that happen in a safe, controlled manner. Until then, check out one burning in super slow-motion after the break, and remember: only you can prevent nanofires.

Continue reading Combustible carbon nanotubes give off electricity, make really tiny fires (video)

Combustible carbon nanotubes give off electricity, make really tiny fires (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  MITnews  | Email this | Comments

Hard drive manufacturers are about to change the format on new hard drive which will prevent older operating systems (such as Windows XP) from working. The new controller technology is increasing the byte sector size from what it is now (512 bytes) to somewhere in the region of 4K to allow the data that we currently have to day to work better.

The problem will only become apparent if you want to install Windows XP on a new hard drive. At this point it simply wont work.

The new hard drives are supposed to start being launched in 2011 at which point, you won’t be required to switch over as your XP machine will continue to work as normal… that is until the drive fails and you end up having to buy a new drive.

The reason for the shift is that large hard drives (such as 1TB or 2TB models) still use the 512 byte sectors. As a 1TB drive has to pack in a few million of these sectors a lot of wasted space happens due to each sector having bytes before and after it to let the computer know where each sector is. By increasing the size of the sectors to 4k this will essentially cut down about 7/8ths of the wasted space on a drive as well as keep data clustered far better making drives perform better.

All is not lost though if you must keep Windows XP as the new drives (for a time) will be backwards compatible so to speak in that the 4K sectors through emulation although there will be noticeable slowdown in doing this.

Via: BBC News

New Hard Drives to Leave XP Behind

This one has been quite a long time in coming, but Robosoft's service drone has finally made it off the drawing board, collected a catchy name, and headed off to the big world to seek its fortune as an R&D platform. Kompai is a personal assistance bot built around speech -- it understands basic instructions and requests and offers appropriate responses with its own monotonic style. It'll serve as a note and shopping list recorder, a calendar, a music player, or a video conferencing tool for when old grandpappy needs to call his doctor. If you think having a programmable hunk of mobile metal that's permanently connected to the net in your house is a good idea, look out for OEMs picking up the design during the Intercompany Long Term Care Insurance Conference taking place next week. And if you just wanna see a bug-eyed bot talk to an old dude, click past the break for the video.

[Thanks, Erico]

Continue reading Robosoft Kompai takes care of your elderly so you don't have to (video)

Robosoft Kompai takes care of your elderly so you don't have to (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  IEEE Spectrum  | Email this | Comments