“U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal in San Jose, Calif., ordered Google within two days to disclose what terms it’s using to find documents Apple has requested in pretrial information sharing, and to tell Apple which Google employees those documents came from,” writes Bloomberg Business Week. “Google had argued the collection of information would be too burdensome.”

Hilarity ensued.

“The court cannot help but note the irony that Google, a pioneer in searching the Internet, is arguing that it would be unduly burdened by producing a list of how it searched its own files,”  Grewal wrote in a footnote to his order.

Apple took the step of asking the judge to intervene because it believed the search terms Google was using in response to Apple’s document production requests weren’t inclusive enough, and so left things out.

“Apple believes Google purposely uses suboptimal search terms,” writes the FossPatents blog. “For example, Apple claims to know that Google uses a different term internally for what Apple calls ‘slide to unlock.’ As a result, searches for ‘slide to unlock’ wouldn’t deliver too many documents in which Google employees discussed this patented technology. ”

(Why is Google involved in the Samsung case in the first place? Because all of the products said to be infringing run the Android operating system that Google developed.)

Apple was also criticized by the judge for not being more cooperative, such as by telling Google what documents it thought were missing. As you may recall, the 2006 rules for electronic discovery require the different sides in a legal suit to work together and agree on how they will search for documents.

There is, of course, more to the story.

“Warren, a lawyer for Google who is also representing Samsung, explained to the judge that turning over the requested information Apple is seeking could lead to ‘future discovery that we don’t think they’re entitled to’ and give the company ‘ideas about how to proceed that they wouldn’t have had,’” writes BGR.

Good story though.

Heck, the brick I do my backups on isn’t that big.

(You have to understand, I’m old. When I bought my first computer, in 1983, a Hewlett-Packard HP-150 (hey! it had a touchscreen! it was ahead of its time!), I could have gotten a 10-*mega*byte hard disk with it that was the same size as the computer and cost just as much, even with my employee discount. So this is my tell-us-about-the-first-time-you-saw-a-car-Grandma moment.)

So here’s the deal. The Scorpio Blue is a  2.5-inch form factor drive with standard 9.5 mm height, which means it can fit into a notebook. But it’s the first drive with this type of capacity. The way WD was able to do it was by being able to fit 500 GB on each of two platters, rather than the three platters most drives require, said Jason Bache at MyCE:

Traditional terabyte drives use three 334-GB platters to achieve their capacity, which inevitably makes the drives too thick to fit in anything but a desktop or a specially-modified notebook case. Both Samsung’s and Western Digital’s new drives use two 500-GB platters, made possible by advances in platter formatting.

While Samsung announced a similar drive in June, WD is the first vendor to be able to ship one, Bache says, something that is also repeated in numerous other articles, though vendors are apparently taking orders for it.

Shopping for it can be a little challenging; doing a Google shopping search, for example, you run into all sorts of things, including the 12.5 mm version, and ones that aren’t actually 1 TB even if that’s what you search for. (Oddly, there’s also some priced at $4,000 or more; I wonder if it’s some sort of automatic pricing issue.) Anyway, here’s the real thing, and it seems to be $120 or so.

CNET notes that it spins at 5200 rpm instead of 5400 rpm, which means it’s going to be slower (and is probably also behind the low power requirements, low noise, and low operating temperature that WD is touting).

No doubt, as with the quadruple toe loop, everyone will be doing it now that someone proved they can; if nothing else, Seagate will be doing it because it is acquiring Samsung.

For me, it’s still in the waltzing-bear stage, but it’s tempting, just for the size queen aspect of it.

Didn’t we just hear about this?

In this case, however, it’s not Hitachi GST that’s doing the selling, but Samsung Electronics, which — like Hitachi — was primarily involved in the spinning disk market and had less of a presence in the solid-state disk (SSD) market and would face expensive retooling to support it, according to the article in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday that sparked all this.

The potential purchaser? Seagate Technologies, which was leapfrogged by the Western Digital-Hitachi GST merger, which took up almost 50% of the market, according to iSuppli. Seagate accounted for 29% of hard disk drive shipments in the fourth quarter, while Samsung accounted for 10%, iSuppli said. In addition, sales of hard disk drives are down 4% in Q1 compared with Q4, iSuppli said.

.

Perhaps Seagate — which considered and rejected a Hitachi purchase itself — didn’t want to miss out a second time. And unlike a Hitachi purchase, which might have courted an antitrust claim, a Samsung purchase would be in the consumer marketplace, rather than the enterprise market Seagate and Hitachi share, according to Jason Mick at DailyTech.

The source for all this? “A person familiar with the matter,” who said the Korean Samsung was hoping for $1.5 billion (compared to the $4.3 billion Hitachi fetched), but might settle for $1 billion.

Seagate itself wouldn’t comment, but Chris Mellor of The Register noted earlier this month, in a piece about Seagate’s earnings, that its chairman and CEO, Stephen Luczo, was spending three months in the Far East, and that the Seagate’s earnings report had noted, “The preliminary results for the fiscal third quarter do not include the impact of any potential new restructuring activities, future mergers, acquisitions, financing, dispositions or other business combinations the company may undertake.”

Samsung, meanwhile, estimated lower earnings earlier this month, and is getting involved in areas far removed from the hard disk business, such as biopharmaceuticals.

The Journal quoted Richard Kugele, an analyst at Needham & Co., as saying “there is really no legitimate alternative” to a sale of the unit to Seagate other than for Samsung to shut it down.

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