Not every Philips announcement can be as exciting as the concept projects showcased at Sense and Simplicity this week. But some of them can be useful, such as this whopping one terabyte external hard drive. Although the word "terabyte" is now familiar to most, it's still relatively uncommon to see that much storage in a mainstream product, and this single-disk drive will have those with massive backups to do rubbing their hands with glee.
Western Digital has just announced some new colourful additions to the slim, light Passport range. These flat external drives have proved popular thanks to being extremely lightweight, plug and play, PC and Mac compatible and holding up to 250GB of whatever it is you want to back up - Western Digital points out that's 71,000 photos / 62,000 MP3s / 100 hours of DVD quality video. Now the plain black version is being complemented by new white, red and green drives. The green is a tad acid, but we're sure it'll go down well around the Shiny forums. $199.99 (£100) although there are 160GB and 120GB versions which are cheaper.
Western Digital Passport Portable Drive 250GB [via Chip Chick]
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$330-800 [Product page]
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Well, we've had far more stupid gilded devices (iPod Shuffle, I'm looking at you). If you really have to show off your love of all things glossy, shiny and expensive-looking, then you could do worse than this LaCie external hard drive, designed with Ora-Ïto.
The flowing lines and sparkling finish of the Golden Disk conceal a 500GB, USB-connected hard drive which will involve digging in your pocket for $189 (around £95) when it becomes available in late October.
Press Release [via Technabob]
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Have friends who take a lot of photos and want to make backups but are a bit nervous of the whole drag and drop nature of most backup drives? Or they're worried that they'll forget to include something important? Well, this is the low-to-no intervention solution. It's available exclusively at Boots the Chemist, for £89.
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Multiple computer users in a household can stay connected with Iomega's Home Network Hard Drive. Heck, a small company can make use of this drive with its mega-capacity for storing files, photos (up to 400,000), music (100,000 files), and video. With 500GB of storage you can redefine "home" anyway you want. PC, Mac and Linux users will all find something to love about this mean drive at a nice price.
$199 [Product page]
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Remember the Time Machine DVR TVs? Well, LG also had new 160GB DVRs with dual digital tuners on display. Each will naturally allow you to watch one program while recording another. They've got Freeview Playback Certification from the UK's Digital TV group, so you can record subtitles and closed captions, in addition to video and audio, as well as intelligently schedule recording times in case some irksomely scheduled footie gets in the way of your X-Factor catchup.
The PC users amongst you might want to check these more computer-orientated products- the first being a dual format external optical drive, featuring a 6x Blu-Ray disc rewriter and 3x HD-DVD reading, as well as lightscribe technology for labelling compatible discs. Also of interest to PC users were the new 20-inch and 22-inch LCD models with improved contrast ration to shorten response times.
Apple's much-rumoured all-in-one iMac range has finally been unveiled, and among the line-up are gorgeous brushed aluminium 20" and 24" widescreen machines. They're all Intel Core 2 Duo- based, of course, and feature the ultra-thin keyboard that is to replace all Apple keyboards in the future. The iSight webcam that has become a staple feature of iMacs is still in place, with iLife '08 on board.
The 20" iMac starts at £799, which Apple is keen to point out shaves £200 off previous models, despite boasting an even slimmer and more elegant design. The 24" iMac starts at £1,349 with a similar saving; Apple is clearly eager to address the persistent whisperings that Mac hardware is too expensive. More about the specifications and look after the jump.
According to Hi-Grade, "this is a notebook that says it loud - it's pink and it's proud!" and they're not kidding. The deep fuschia of this slimline notebook definitely makes a statement. What's under the hood? Well, for a budget, £499 laptop, it's packing a fair bit in. There's a 120GB hard drive, dual-format DVD/CD rewriter, Intel Core Due processor and 1GB memory, so it's got nothing to blush about. The comfortable 15.4" widescreen and Intel Speedstep power saving battery means its relatively portable, too.
It comes with a much more subtle black carry case but if you do want to match laptop to accessories peripherals such as a pink case (+£17.63 on the full price) the pink Beetle-shaped mouse (£12.98) and "Bow Wow" pink terrier pup-shaped external speakers (£24.99) are available.
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I'm all in favour of jazzing up that dull desktop with some shiny skins and a bevy of new features, but it does seem that the designers here have just taken the design of an iPod nano and magnified it. Still, iPods are popular for a reason, and this machine combines sweet styling with some high profile hardware. The Moneual Inovy features liquid cooled 64 bit dual core Athlon 4400+ processors and a strangely mounted dual layer DVD player that opens vertically. There are four USB ports, and four expansion slots, so whatever your device you'll hopefully have a way of accessing it. It's also possible to customize the Inovy to your exact specifications, which is a nice touch.
$695 from Moneual [ via Engadget ]
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Seagate Technology’s first 1TB hard drive will retail for $399 beginning in the third quarter of this year. The Barracuda 7200.11 will have 32MB of cache and a 5 year warranty.
Just how big is 1TB? It’s one terabyte, which is a thousand GB, and we all know what that is these days. But just to put it into perspective, that’s precisely 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, otherwise known as a really really big number, although Wikipedia will tell you that according to traditional maths, a terabyte was 1,099,511,627,776 bytes = 10244 or 240 bytes, but that this is now called a tebibyte, to avoid confusion. Don’t know about you but I’m still a little confused. Let’s try this. 1TB is the amount of information you can store by turning 50,000 trees into paper, according to researchers at the University of California at Berkeley. Okay, now we’re talking, but how many movies is it?
[via CNet]
Related Post: 1TB hard drives at CES
The Moleskine hard drive elicits deep ambivalence. On the one hand, anything by Moleskine is sleek, light, portable, and has an unimpeachable literary heritage. Perhaps a hard drive stored within a Moleskine would be flavoured with greatness right through all its contents. On the other hand, the dispersal of the potential contents of the Moleskine (though the creator does note you can use the pages to make your own Hipster PDA) can't but tug my heartstrings. The results are very intellectually sexy - though as one commenter notes, "Just remember to put it in your computer bag when going through airport security. I could see myself putting the wrong moleskine in my back pocket and having TSA pull that out with the harddrive and going berserk!" [GT]
The Geekster Moleskine [via Boing Boing]
More hard drives
Drobo is a storage robot with four hard disk slots, which it manages as one enormous drive. If you insert an 80 gig SATA, a 250 gig SATA, and a 110 gig EIDE, it will handle them all as one continuous (counts on fingers) 440 gig external drive accessible via USB 2.0. Drives are hot-swappable and no tools are involved: open the case and pop in the new storage. It also detects if a drive is failing and does what it can about it. It states the entire storage pool is "protected" and in general that Drobo is "self-aware". It's not clear precisely how Drobo "protects" your data or is "self-aware", but considering some of the data I have that I'd like "protected", my storage being "self-aware" might be a fate worse than electron death. $699. [GT]
More hard drives
Just in case you've not gone craft-mad and made a tote bag out of all your old floppy disks, Gizoo's offering a USB floppy drive. It's compatible with 3.5" disks and USB 1.1 powered. Best of all: it's portable. When you and Indiana Jones find that cache of floppy disks in the Temple of Doom, you'll have no problem reading them on your state-of-the-art archeologist's laptop!
£17.95 from Gizoo
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Seagate has been spying on me and my friends. Our angst-ridden discussions about upgrading our phones and losing valuable info (read: pictures of random cute people in nightclubs) will come to an end with Seagate's latest addition to hard drive heaven: Dave. Sounding like a safe pair of hands, Dave is a dedicated 10GB or 20GB mobile phone drive. Bluetooth, Wi-fi and a USB port allow for video, music, games, and business data to transfer between Dave to your phone. And if "business data" means saving text messages, I'm already in love with Dave. This hard drive doesn't make an appearance until later this year, but for forward-thinking gadgetheads, it's worth planning for the future. Will Dave be useful with the iPhone's measly memory allowance? Time will tell...
Project price US$200 Product page
Related stories: Hard Drives
There she goes again: banging on about hard drives. Well for any of you scofflaws who missed my cautionary tale about backing up or Susi's iPod mishap, Seagate is tempting you with hard drive tasty tech goodness. Just out: the FreeAgent range. The FreeAgent's just darn pretty with its chocolatey surface and orange trim. I'm partial to the FreeAgent Go with 120GB of storage room. This one also has bigger (up to 700GB) and smaller (12GB, 80GB) siblings for your desktop or pocket/handbag/tote.
Also cute: Seagate's taken to calling hard drives "data movers." Shift it, data.
US$139.99-$419.99 US Retailers
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Perhaps you resist going buckwild over every Apple announcement, but would still like technological innovation in your home. Welcome to Lifebox TV. It's a media storage hard drive that hooks up to your television, with results similar to the much talked about Apple TV. Lifebox supports a variety of audio files and a plethora of movie formats. It also doubles as an external hard drive. With storage capacities from 160GB to 500GB, that's a whole lotta media goin' on.
From £140-260 at Maplin
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Unfortunately, we’ve all been there at one time or another. You’re typing away on that all-important presentation/essay/spreadsheet and * pffft *. If you’re a Mac user, you see an old school Mac with little x’s for eyes or, better yet, a bomb. There’s also what I call Mac’s spinning beach ball of death. PC users get a warning about a system error and the advice to backup. But how can you back up when your computer won’t budge from the warning screen? Any way you slice it your computer’s hard drive has just had a big ol’ slice of disk failure pie.
When is the last time you backed up your work? Not just the one document that preceded the disk failure, but any of your stuff? For most of us, the answer is, oh, 1993. You know there’s a floppy in a drawer somewhere. Alas, that’s just not good enough, particularly when so many of us live virtually. In addition to your important documents, think of the bookmarks in your web browser and all the music you’ve uploaded from your CD collection or downloaded. Gone, daddy, gone.
So far, CES seems to be all about digital photo frames and absolutely massive amounts of memory on tiny bits of kit. Yesterday we saw the first commercial 1 terabyte drive from Hitachi, and this morning Memorex are launching their latest USB hard drives, which can hold up to a massive 160GB of information. They're an addition to the TravelDrive range, which already contains the 12GB Mega TravelDrive (left). These babies are being dubbed the 'Ultra' TravelDrive, and will retail at $129.99, $149.99 and $199.99 respectively for 80GB, 120GB and 160GB models. They'll have a 'rugged' design with rubber grip area and 'nature inspired colours' with interchangeable faceplates if you fancy a bit of a change (colours vary depending on the capacity of your drive), The drives will work on your PC or Mac and will be available at stores and online at eMemorex.com by April. Pics as soon as we have 'em!
From: Apple bans drunk driving apps on iOS devices, sanity wins out