According to research from Parks Associates, an increasing number of consumers own connected devices such as HDTVs, Blu-ray Disc players, game consoles and digital media players such as the WD TV Live Plus HD media player (Home Networks for Consumer Electronics 2009). By the end of 2010, Parks Associates forecasts consumers will own 111 million of these devices, with 37 million Internet-capable devices in the U.S. alone, but “connecting” them can be challenging and costly. In a recent Parks Associates survey, 42 percent of respondents unwilling to connect their TVs to the Internet indicated that either their router was too far from the device or it would be too complicated to set up or both (Digital Media Evolution II 2010).

Featuring HomePlug AV technology, the WD Livewire Powerline AV Network Kit provides users with data transfer speeds up to 200 megabits per second (Mbps), enabling glitch-free playback of Full-HD 1080p video streams on up to seven connected devices. Setup is as easy as plugging in a lamp. Consumers do not need to undertake home improvement projects to route new wiring between rooms. They simply plug one of the two adapters in the kit into their router and an electrical outlet then plug the other adapter into another outlet where they need access to wired network connections. Users can stream video to four connected devices in the home theater and also gain an additional three network ports by their router.

With the advent of SATA6 and motherboard manufacturers offering their latest and greatest for this technology it was only a matter of time. Western Digital has released their WD Black 1TB drive incorporating this technology.

The 3.5 inch drive bears some similarities to its former kin , and like all Black drives speed is set at 7200rpm. Besides the 6GB/s interface the next major change made is a doubling of the cache available on this drive; up from the typical 32MB for a total of 64MB.

Although it can interface with SATA 3GB/s you are unlikely to notice any performance changes using this old setup, the same cannot be said for 6GB/s. Available now, but with North American pricing unknown at this time, we should hopefully be seeing these on store shelves soon. However, like all newly released technology products, we can expect to pay a little more for the latest and greatest.