By now we all know that Toshiba has released its HD-DVD drive to the wild. Some people didn"t care, while others had to be the first to own one. For Lorin Thwaits, being among the first to own one wasn"t enough. He ran out and bought one and then took it home. Before even plugging it in, he disassembled the entire HD-DVD player.
In his tear down article he explains that the HD-DVD player actually includes a Pentium 4 2.5GHz processor and 1GB of PC2700 memory. No wonder they cost $500 each. The HD-DVD player also included a standard IDE HD-DVD player. One can only wonder if you could actually plug this into your PC while running Vista.
The Toshiba player runs on Red Hat using a 256MB USB flash memory module that was originally formatted with FAT32, and then repartitioned with ext2fs. There is also a tear down video available. Props to this guy for having the guts to tear apart his brand new HD-DVD player without even plugging it in!