Western Digital 'Green' hard drives now available in capacities up to 6TB

Look no further than a solid state drive for breakneck speed. If a large-capacity drive for storage is what you're after, however, traditional spinning hard drives are still the best bet in terms of price per GB. And if you need a whole heck of a lot of storage, Western Digital's two new budget-minded drives might be right up your alley.

The Western Digital Green line of cool and quiet hard drives now has a couple of new additions, a 5TB drive and a 6TB drive. These consumer-oriented 3.5-inch drives both offer 64MB of cache and use WD's IntelliPower technology to reduce rotational speed when the drive isn't being heavily used to conserve energy.

According to documentation from WD, the 6TB and the 5TB are the two fastest models in the entire Green line with sustained data write speeds of up to 175MB/sec and 170MB/sec, respectively. The next fastest drive in the line is the 4TB model at 150MB/sec.

Of course, the increased speed also comes at a cost: higher energy consumption. We're nitpicking here but the two new drives consume 5.3 watts under read / write scenarios and 0.4 watts in standby / sleep mode compared to just 4.1 watts under load on the 3TB model.

Unfortunately, Western Digital hasn't revealed pricing or availability on either of the new Green drives. I've reached out to marketing for clarification and will update this post when I hear something back.

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Nvidia's Shield tablet is available now and promoting Twitch streaming

Nvidia is expanding its line of mobile gaming products with the Nvidia Shield Tablet today. Right now, you can pre-order the tablet for $299, with the option to add a wireless controller for $59.

The $299 covers the 16GB wifi version, but you can nab a 32GB LTE version for $399. The tablets sport a Tegra K1 192 core GPU, 2GB of RAM with a Cortex A15 CPU, front-facing speakers, and a multitouch display. 

The tablet will be the first mobile device to integrate Twitch streaming as well, with Twitch offering a mobile SDK for developers to use. There's also a 5MP camera, microphone, and accompanying chat overlay to make streaming your games as effortless as possible -- at least, that's the hope behind Nvidia's push to incorporate streaming sessions. 

This tablet will also be the first to stream PC games via Nvidia Grid, a cloud-based gaming service that early adopters in Northern California can utilize to stream a library of PC games, then save them in the cloud. 

If streaming online isn't your thing, there's the option to use Nvidia Console Mode, which allows you to stream your games at home in native 1080p HD. 

The Shield Tablet looks as though it's making great strides in closing the loop between mobile gamers and console gamers, making streaming easier and more accessible to everyone. It's releasing July 29, so if you're interested in pouncing on it early, you might want to consider pre-ordering soon.

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