rpm

Think 2.5-inch spinning hard disk drives are slow compared with the solid-state variety? Not always, Toshiba seems to be saying with today's announcement of drives that top 10,000rpm.

Toshiba launched four 2.5-inch HDDs, ranging up to 900GB in capacity, that boast speeds of 10,500rpm.

That's faster than the 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm 2.5-inch HDDs typically found in laptops.

The internal transfer rate for Toshiba's AL13SEB900 family of HDDs is 286 MB/s (megabytes per second), a boost of approximately 32 percent over the previous generation of drives "due to improved liner recording density," according to Toshiba.

Though slower than the fastest solid-state drives on the market, that kind of transfer rate approaches some less-expensive SSDs in speed. … Read more

CNET Audiophiliac and general audio diva Steve "Sphere" Guttenberg is back on The 404 Podcast for his last appearance this year, and as usual he brings a list of talking points, like a kooky theory on how to curb population control, and when the iPad will eventually overtake the big screen TV.

Jeff and the official 404 graphic designer Blake Stevenson have also partnered together for Crave's first weekly comic strip "Low Latency,"and a big congratulations goes out to our video voice mail contest winners! Check out the videos below:… Read more

I know a little about under-dash record players from the late 1960s, but I was totally clueless about 1950s car turntables, until I heard writer Paul Collins talking about them on WNYC's "Soundcheck" radio show a few weeks ago. I chatted with Collins to learn more about these groovy hi-fis.

Columbia Records developed the proprietary Highway Hi-Fi format: a thick 7-inch, 16 2/3rpm record that had up to one hour playing time per side. Chrysler executives jumped on the idea, and offered the turntable as an option in their 1956 models, and were hoping one out … Read more

When Theo Braakman was 12 years old, he got a turntable "just to demolish," but he was so fascinated by the machine's inner workings he spared the turntable's life. He put a mirror under it to get a better view of the automatic record changing mechanism's gears, belts, and levers that lifted the tonearm and the end of a record side, moved the arm to the rest position, dropped another record to play, and gently lowered the "needle" into the grooves. Braakman played records on that first turntable until he fully understood how the mechanism worked. But that just led to more turntables!

Theo and his wife recently celebrated their 25th anniversary. Braakman told me his wife had one request when they first got married: she wanted him to limit his collecting habit to only one kind of collectible, and the choices were typewriters, tape recorders, or turntables. Braakman now has more than 230 turntables, and lives in the Netherlands.

Some work, some do not. Braakman tries to restore them as much as he can, but parts are hard to find, especially for the really old ones. If during restoration he discovers a vital part is defective or missing, he'll try to find a matching model to cannibalize for parts. That's why he doesn't usually start a serious restoration until he has at least two of the same model. However, some models are so rare it can take years to find another one.

Judging by the photos on Brakkman's Web site, he does superb work. These machines may look simple on the outside, but their intricate mechanisms are something to see. Braakman's clear photography documents many of the turntables' insides and their exterior beauty. I've included just a few here, but there's a lot more on his Web site. You can see the turntables playing records on Braakman's YouTube pages.

Braakman's collection focuses on specific brands that manufactured automatic machines and record changers. I see a lot of familiar names like Dual, Garrard, Thorens, and Philips among brands I've never heard of, such as Luxor, Jobo, and Perpetuum-Ebner. Most of the turntables are stored outside his house, along with his large collection of 78-rpm records.

He's not an audiophile. I gather it's not the vintage sound that interests Braakman; it's the technology. When I asked if there's an end point to his collecting he said he would like to find just the right Thorens TD124 Mark I from 1957. It's an audiophile turntable classic, and Mark IIs, from a decade later are easier to find.

If you have an exceptional hi-fi collection, tell us all about it in the comments section. TVs from the 1940s or 1950s? Share the news with us.

More turntable photos after the jump.… Read more

It's not hard these days to find external storage devices that offer 2TB or even 4TB of storage. However, most of them use low-power and relatively low-performance internal hard drives, such as the My Book series from Western Digital or the FreeAgent series from Seagate. If you are looking for top speed and top capacity form external storage solutions for your Mac, G-Tech has some news for you.

The company announced Monday that it now incorporates Hitachi's 2TB, 7,200rpm, 32MB cache buffer SATA hard drives across its entire 3.5-inch product line, offering different storage solutions from … Read more

Awhile ago Western Digital released its top-capacity laptop hard drive, the Scorpio Blue, which is the first 2.5-inch hard drive to offer 1TB of storage. On Tuesday, Toshiba announced its own largest laptop hard drive to date, the MKxx65GSX, which caps at 640GB.

Though smaller in capacity, the new Toshiba hard drive has two advantages over the WD Scorpio Blue. First, it spins at 5400rpm as opposed to the 5200rpm of the WD, meaning it potentially has a faster throughput speed.

The new Toshiba drive also comes in the regular 9.5mm thickness and therefore will work in all applications where SATA 2.5-inch hard drives currently are used. The Scorpio Blue is 12.5mm thick and therefore only fits in laptops with a larger hard drive bay.

The new hard drive is built based on Toshiba's new 320GB-per-platter design which, according to the company, reduces power consumption and heat dissipation by more than 80 percent compared with 3.5-inch hard drives of the same capacity. This helps save energy and prolong the life span of the drive.… Read more

After releasing relatively low-performance 2TB hard drives a few months ago, Western Digital announced Tuesday that it's now shipping high-performance versions of these top-capacity drives.

The new drives are the WD Caviar Black and the WD RE4. According to the company, the former is designed for desktops while the latter is suited for servers and network storage devices.

These two new hard drives are based on WD's 500GB-per-platter technology. They both combine 7200rpm spin speed, 64MB cache, dual-stage actuator technology, SATA 2 (3Gb/s) interface, and an integrated dual processor.

(Dual actuator technology is a head-positioning system with … Read more

Sure, we've all probably heard loud racing engines from the stands and sidelines in the open air. But have you ever heard an 800 horsepower engine within four walls, up close at speeds up to 9000 RPM? If you haven't, then this video should serve as a decent substitute as we fire up a Lucas Oil's R5/P7 Dodge Sprint Cup race engine and let that baby scream!

This video, produced by the fine folks at BangShift.com, hook up the R5/P7 engine to the dyno and rev that hunk of steel at speeds that eventually … Read more

Legend has it that on December 4, 1877, Thomas Edison was the first person to record and play back the human voice. Maybe not.

The Video Interchange site notes that "a possibility exists that Edison himself, in fact, might not have been the very first person to have recorded and played back the human voice. This was most likely made by his two key assistants: Charles Batchelor, his chief assistant, and John Kruesi, his head machinist."

You can see Edison's machine on the Video Interchange Web site. And while you're there, check out a few of the fascinating but obscure audio formats on display.

Video Interchange offers transfer services for a vast range of ancient and recent audio formats. For example, Video Interchange can transfer 78 rpm records to CD.

… Read more