Earlier today, Amazon officially announced the beta version of their Game Downloads store. They currently have over 600 games catalogued, all of which are priced at $10 or less. As an added bonus, they are giving away the full versions of Jewel Quest II, Built-A-Lot, and The Scruff; completely free for the next week. Each game in the store has a timed trial, which allows you to try the game for 30 minutes before you actually have to buy it, which is a nice feature.

I haven’t had a chance to check this out yet, but it seems like a really cool idea. The only downside I can see is that they only offer casual games right now, though that could change depending on whether or not the beta is successful. Anyways, if anyone here has used it, be sure to post a comment and let us know how it is.

Amazon Game Downloads.

Is your collection of “media” growing at an exponential rate? Western Digital could have what you’re looking for, as it launches the industry’s first 2 TB hard disk drive.

ZoomWestern Digital’s first 2 TB hard drive (model WD20EADS) makes use of the company’s 500 GB/platter technology (with 400 Gb/in2 areal density), with a set of four to make up the massive capacity. The drive will feature a 32 MB cache.

Most computer users are still running modestly sized drives in comparison to WD’s new offering, and seem to be managing fine. Will there ever be a real need to hit 2 TB when even 1 TB seems like a luxury? Mark Geenen, president of Trend Focus, says more and more people are taking to the roominess.

“While some in the industry wondered if the end consumer would buy a 1 TB drive, already some 10 percent of 3.5-inch hard drive sales
are at the 1 TB level or higher, serving demand from video applications and expanding consumer media libraries,” said Geenen. “The 2 TB hard drives will continue to satisfy end user’s insatiable desire to store more data on ever larger hard drives.”

The new 3.5-inch drive will be a part of the Caviar Green family, which, as the name suggests, is part of WD’s low-energy line. The drive will make use of IntelliPower, which WD says “fine-tunes the balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance.”

Overall, the new 2 TB drive’s specialty is storage, not speed.

I’m only posting this for those who haven’t seen it yet.