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Panasonic LF-MB121JD Blu-ray drive ships June 10th for $850
In what would appear to be a global release, though it's unclear from the machine translation, Panasonic just announced that they will be shipping their LF-MB121JD Blu-ray Disc drive for PCs (not to be confused with their DMP-BD10 player expected in September) in OEM, regular, and slimline slot-loading form factors, starting 10 June with support for 13 BD / DVD / CD formats. The drive delivers on both 25GB and dual-layer 50GB Blu-ray discs allowing you to write at 2x (72Mbps) speeds to both BD-R / RE formats via a suite of bundled software. It also features 8x write speeds to both DVD±R and DVD RW, 4x to DVD±R DL, 6x to DVD-RW, 5x to DVD-RAM, 24x to CD-R and 16x to CD-RW. Pretty much the same unit (and may well be) as the BenQ BW1000, but superior to both the Samsung SH-B022 (which can read but not write to DVD and CD formats) and the Pioneer BDR-101A which, oddly, the last time we looked, didn't support CDs at all. Panasonic also announced their 25GB and 50GB 2x discs which will hit the shelves starting April 28 just in time to prime the pump a bit.[Via Newlaunches]
Seagate leaks 750GB Barracuda 7200.10
Well, it's been a rather long year or so since 500GB drives came into style as the standard for high end disks, but it looks like perpendicular recording will save the day in stagnant storage. Seagate's inadvertently leaked the Barracuda 7200.10 line of SATA drives with speeds up to 3Gbps (SATA II), 7200rpm, 4.16ms latency, NCQ, 16MB cache, and 750GB of storage. 750 freaking gigs, man. Just another step on the magic road to a 1 terabyte petabyte drive though, you know? [Warning: PDF link][Via DailyTech, thanks, Diego]
Scratch support: Suck disc
There's anarchy in the UK. Well, at least when it comes scratched PDZ discs: I just got off the phone from the UK XB360 support team - as you know when the 360 launched and it was scratching discs, microsoft was replacing copies , at least of perfect dark zero - my 360 managed to scratch my copy of pd0, and its now unplayable, without my interfering with the console - having called up the UK 360 support team, they told me that they've done "research" into it, and the only way this happens is by someone "moving" the console during gameplay, so they refused to replace it- firstly thats not exact kosher seeing as its all too easy to move the 360, and secondly, its patently not true because mine seems to have managed to destroy a disc without the slightest interference. Somebody ought to figure out just how much movement it takes to ruin a $60 DVD. You know who that someone should be? Microsoft Support. How many other people have run into this problem and what was your experience with MS? Does not moving the console during gameplay mean we'll never see a 360 on Pimp My Ride? [Thanks Theo]
The Pleiades USB-FX drive enclosure
Do you long for your lonely G5 tower to have its own little Mini Me buddy to sit next to it and provide extra storage space for all your files?
