Japan's Toshiba Corp. aims to put disk drives for high-definition DVDs on all its laptops next year as it strives to gain an edge in the high-stakes next-generation DVD format battle, a Toshiba executive said on Tuesday.

We told you guys about Data Robotics Drobo storage robot a few months back. The little hard drive enclosure that will hold up to four 3.5" drives. Well we've been trying out our very own demo unit for the last week or so. What do we think? Jump on in and find out.
galleryPost('droboreview', 8, 'Drobo Gallery');

First things first, what didn't we like?

Price
It's $500, and it doesn't come with any storage-only the enclosure. Now just for fun let's go over what else we could get for $500:
• 4GB iPhone
• Xbox 360 Elite or PS3 20GB or 2 Nintendo Wii's
• Toshiba HD-A1 HD DVD Player
Ok, so it's either one of those guys or the Drobo. But if money's no object or you really like hard drive space then that won't be a problem. But if you're like us, we personally would have to think long and hard about this purchase before we dropped that much cash on an empty hard drive enclosure.

Ports
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Universal Home Entertainment has just announced a number of new HD-DVD titles, slated for release in August, including the 2004 remake of Geroge A. Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead. Packed with more blood, ...

Toshiba SD-L912A: HD DVD rewriter for notebooks! Japanese electronics maker Toshiba has announced that they have developed a HD DVD rewriter product small enough to be usable on notebook computers. This product is codenamed Toshiba SD-L912A and they would showcase it at the upcoming Computex trade show. Toshiba added that the drive can read and rewrite [...]

Filed under: Laptops

We already had a pretty good idea of what Acer's first Gemstone laptop, the Aspire 5920, would look like, but we've now got the full rundown of specs, along with a price, courtesy of Acer's Thailand site. As we knew before, it's a Santa Rosa-based machine, boasting a 15.4-inch WXGA display, NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics, and an optional HD-DVD drive, among other not too shabby features. What we didn't know is that it'd come with your choice of T7100 or T7300 Core 2 Duo processors, up to 4GB of RAM, and a max 200GB hard drive. Also notably lacking until now was any word on price, which has now been revealed to be 46,900 or 59,900 baht depending on the configuration, or roughly $1,425 and $1,820 for those of you outside of Thailand.
 
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

HD DVD fans are getting a double helping of good news this morning thanks to Toshiba. Their SD-L912A is not only the first HD DVD-RW drive for laptops, but measuring in at half an inch thick, it's also the slimmest. Sure it's slow (1x read/write speeds) and faster drives are bound to follow, but for now it's the only option available. It'll be out this July. – Louis Ramirez
Toshiba SD-L912A [Impress]

Whether it is lower production costs or a new need to compete seriously with Toshiba's HD DVD camp, Sony has sliced $100 off of its original pricing for the BDP-S300 Blu-ray player, to a list price of $499. That's still high given the fact that a) the PS3 lists for just $100 more and offers Blu-ray playback and a lot of extra functionality and b) Toshiba's $399 HD-A2 HD DVD player is easy to find for under $300.
Is this enough of a price break, keeping with Sony's traditional "brand premium"? Or will Sony continue to pursue Toshiba down below the hard deck, where stakes are high and profit margins are low. Will Sony ride into the danger zone, so to speak? We'll certainly know by Christmas. – Wilson Rothman
Sony cuts price on new Blu-ray player [AP]

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

Prices on next-gen optical HD players continue to plummet today with Sony's announced price drop on their new BDP-S300 Blu-ray Disc player. At $499 list, it's now priced for $100 less than the Playstation 3 which currently reigns supreme as the cheapest (and noisiest) BD player on the market. In fact, the move might even cannibalize PS3 sales now that BD buffs have a cheaper source for HDMI 1.3 playback from a unit offering a traditional remote control and A/V stylings. It's still $100 or so more than Toshiba's cheapest HD DVD player which recently shed a Benjamin in time for Father's Day. But hey Sony, Toshiba... it's not the price that's holding back interest. It's the uncertainty you've created by launching two essentially equal but incompatible formats onto the world of consumer electronics. If you don't get your houses in order soon, your problems won't be with each other. Rather, it'll be be those traditional and not-so-traditiona...

With only a few major chip revisions on the immediate horizon, Taiwan's strengths – cost-cutting and, more recently, system design – will be on display, analysts said. Intel's Bearlake chipset will be launched, with sneak peeks of Intel's X38 chipset andAMD's RD790 chipset. And will there be low-cost Blu-ray and HD DVD drives?