Beach Camera via eBay Daily Deal offers the Toshiba Canvio 3.0 Plus 750GB USB 2.0 Portable 2.5″ External Hard Drive, model no. E05A075PBU2XK, for $57.99. With free shipping, that’s $0.08/GB, $7 under our December mention, and the best total price we’ve seen for any 750GB portable drive. (It’s a current price low by $17.) It runs at 5400 rpm and features an 8MB cache. Deal ends September 1 at 3:25 pm ET. Read more
Apple has issued a recall for a “small number” of 1TB Seagate hard drives in the 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMacs. Apple’s announcement doesn’t go into specifics, but says the systems were sold between May 2011 and July 2011. If you’re are experiencing issues you can take your iMac to an Apple retail store or Apple service provider, or you can contact Apple technical support. Apple will replace the hard drive free of charge. (via MacRumors)
CNet has discovered that OS X Lion users lose support for Time Machine backups with third-party NAS hard drives. Time Machine in OS X Lion is now only compatible with Netatalk 2.0. This means that third-party NAS (network attached storage) drives will need a software upgrade from their respective manufactures in order to work with Apple’s next-generation Mac operating system. Users of cable-connected external hard drives will not be affected. Drobo, the company behind popular network attached storage devices has noted the issues on their website:
DroboFS, B800fs and DroboPro FS users running Mac OS X Lion (OS X 10.7) will experience problems with Time Machine.
The next official firmware release for all “FS” products will ensure full compatibility with the released version of Mac OS X Lion, including use of Time Machine.
Another popular NAS drive maker, Synology, has already released a fix in beta form. Other NAS drive makers will likely follow up with their own OS X Lion compatibility updates.
As we get close to the Lion launch, several tipsters have provided more information regarding the Apple retail overnight and days after. Tonight, Apple retail will hold an overnight from approximately 11pm – 7 am to give the retail staff enough time to update the stores visual elements with new marketing materials and re-image all display Macs with Lion.
As previously reported, our tipsters say most stores have recently received an external LaCie hard drive containing Lion installs, but we have received new information that the drives contain 3 different install images for Lion; Normal, Pro, and Joint Venture.
JointVenture is an enterprise membership program to support businesses running Macs and iDevices. It is believed that each of these installs will include unique software titles, and some of which could be new.
Furthermore we’ve heard rumblings that some stores will be receiving maxed out Mac Pro towers to be used as Lion distribution caching centers (speculation here). Some believe that these stations would allow customers to purchase Lion (3.5GB) from the Mac App store and download it directly from the store server in minutes rather than hours it takes over a normal broadband connection.
MacOS X Server and internal builds of Time Capsule allow for Software Update Caching, so this is certainly something within Apple’s capabilities. Also, Apple told Computerworld that users could come into the store to download Lion last month.
This would also be a huge help to customers who do not have access to a broadband Internet connection or users who want to walk through the install process with an Apple employee during a personal training session. It would obviously also save Apple some internet bandwidth which at 3.5GB per user adds up.
There’s not much to say about the new Western Digital My Book Studio 3TB hard drive. It looks quite nice and would go nicely with a Mac Pro or any aluminum Mac. The new MyBook Studio, unlike the previous My Book LX models, doesn’t have the LED display which showed free space and other nice specs without the need to dig it up from the connected computer. It does, however, have a quiet, cool running green hard drive with a fan-less enclosure. But the $150/$200/$250 for 1TB/2TB/3TB models, it isn’t going to hit 9to5toys.com anytime soon.
In fact, the same 3TB Western Digital Internal Green Drive resides in a USB-only package for only $130. Because this is a green drive, the extra speed that Firewire provides isn’t as noticeable as with a high performance drive. See speed tests and more images below. Read more
From 9to5toys.com
Amazon offers the four star-rated Western Digital Elements 2.5 TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive for $99.99 (<$.04/GB). This drive features reliable WD GreenPower Technology, which claims to reduce energy consumption by 30% and has a portable case which also adds protection.
