Just last week, I noticed on XLR8YourMac.com that OWC was advertising 320GB Western Digital 2.5″ EIDE hard disks. I thought it was a typo, since nobody makes an EIDE drive bigger than 160GB except for WD, and I thought it pretty unlikely they’d push R&D dollars into a dying connection standard. To my pleasant surprise, a day later, the WD3200BEVE was listed on their corporate site.
This is good news for anyone who, for whatever reason, needs to keep their older PowerPC Mac portables alive a bit longer, and even better news for those who wish to hack their AppleTV with a 320GB hard disk! Going from 40GB to 160GB is decent, which is why Apple chose to offer it as an option. But why only go to 250GB, which was for a long time the previous largest disk option available? The new drive allows hardware hackers to get a bit more utility out of the AppleTV, which is becoming something of a surprise hit.
Considering that the AppleTV has not been updated in the 2 years since its launch, it’s amazing that the little thing is selling as well as it is. I hope that Apple sees fit to officially offer a 320GB drive option on the AppleTV should they continue to stick with EIDE. But, seriously, is there a good reason why the next AppleTV wouldn’t have Serial ATA? Then I could toss the (amazing) Western Digital WD5000BEVT in it. Or, even better, hack it to get one of those sweet new 2TB Caviar Green drives running it.
And, for the record, I am not being paid by Western Digital for all of the gushing I give them. I consider not losing my data to be payment enough.