"Hard drive manufacturers are providing incredible levels of performance and capacity to the PC market, as well as to today’s emerging markets demanding massive local storage such as personal video recorders," said Mark Geenly, president of TrendFocus, a research firm specializing in the data storage market "Western Digital has decided to focus on the highest capacity and medium performance EIDE hard drives, and delivers another first with this 200 gigabyte crashbucket."
Office park dad Mark Boyd of Rockville, Maryland echoed the sentiment of the Western Digital hired research firm, "I find it very reassuring to know that I can transfer all of my digital video from our vacation to the Outer Banks to one drive. Then when that drive inevitably stops spinning like every other Caviar I've ever owned, my memories will be safely encased in their own little Western Digital tomb."
To ensure quiet operation in noise-sensitive desktop/work station environments, Western Digital offers hard drives equipped with optional fluid dynamic bearing (FDB) motors and an emergency crash button (ECB).
"If you are on an important phone call and you need that little extra bit of quiet in your office, you'll always have the ECB to immediately bring the drive to a stop. Of course, this won't always damage a drive, so we had to re-engineer the entire drive mounting system to allow the drive to drop right out of it's bay when the button is pushed," said Richard Broadland, lead engineer of the new 200G hard drive. "We have been working with Compaq, or HP or whatever they are called, to position the drive directly over the processor to really improve this new Insta-Crash technology. That way when the ECB is pressed the drive will drop out of the bay and onto the processor giving you a 92.3 percent chance of an unsuccessful reboot."
Some in the industry doubt that 92.3 percent number.
"Maybe in a lab environment you can get a number that high," said a guy with a pocket protector, "but in a real life situation, I doubt you could create that kind of damage on a consistent basis. Although, Western Digital has always been able to surprise me with it's ability to totally screw a system, so who knows."
Industry analysts are calling the ECB a welcome shift in hardware manufacture policy.
"Typically hardware manufacturers have to wait for software developers to deliver a 'killer app' which will drive hardware upgrades. Western Digital has out done itself by creating it's own 'killer app' built right into the hardware, thus creating it's own replacement and upgrade market," noted John Cashman, a PC Magazine mail room guy.
"Not to mention," continued Cashman, "that the for the home market, the only way to back up a drive of this capacity is to buy a second StinkBomb™ drive because no one else has a drive this size, so you'll have two flaming piles of shit in your machine. But they'll be the biggest flaming piles of shit available which will undoubtedly sway yuppies across the nation to adopt this two poop pile system".
