Bargain Hard Drives Appear at Stores

With the economy in a downturn and shoppers looking for bargains, Apple is now stocking a less expensive version of external hard drives as low as $149.95 for 1 terabyte. Previously, Apple’s store carried only the Western Digital Studio version of the My Book hard disk line. For a 1 Tb drive, the drives cost $199.95. Now, in a distinctive bright yellow box, the stores also carry the Mac version of the My Book line, with 1 Tb costing just $149.95. The Macintosh version drops the eSATA and Firewire 800 interfaces, and has a 1-year warranty instead of 5 years. Conspicously absent from the W-D specification is the rotational speed of the drive, frequently used to determine the “speediness” of data transfer. In fact, W-D states that it “cannot guarantee” a particular drive model, interface, rotational speed or cache size inside all its external drives. And the company warns that, “Dismantling any single-drive external enclosure to obtain this information will void the warranty of the hard drive.” The Apple stores have also begun to stock the Mac version of the Passport line of portable external hard drives.

Now the lower-priced "Mac" version of the W-D hard drives in yellow boxes are displayed adjacent to the higher-priced "Studio" versions in the red boxes.

The Passport line of external portable drives is also available in two differently-priced versions.

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