Western Digital have outed a new portable hard-drive, the My Passport Studio, and like the My Book Studio before it they’ve slapped on a super-frugal E Ink panel to show drive status details. Available in 320GB, 500GB and 640GB capacities, the My Passport Studio has both FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 connections and comes ready formatted for use with a Mac.
SilverStone’s HDDBOOST seemed too good to be true: a way to combine an SSD with your existing hard-drive to ramp up performance by up to 70-percent without sacrificing capacity or having to reinstall your OS and software. Over the years we’ve grown suspicious of such claims, but according to HardwareCanucks the HDDBOOST really can deliver some of the speed increase it promises.
LaCie have unveiled a new rugged external hard-drive, and it’s apparently the first on the market with a Power eSATA port. The LaCie Rugged eSATA not only supports transfer speeds of up to 90MB/s, but – if used with a powered USB-eSATA combo connection – can hook up with a single cable.
Remember Sony’s PS3-compatible labelling for external hard-drives, which the company tipped was incoming at the Japanese Torne TV tuner launch? The first fruits of that scheme have now been revealed, in the shape of two Buffalo drives. The Buffalo HD-AV500U2/SC and HD-CL500U2/SC are each certified to play nicely with the new digital TV tuner, and each offer to boost PS3 storage by 500GB.
SlashGear swung by photography accessory experts NEXTO earlier today to see their latest portable storage device for DSLR pros. The NEXTO NVS2500 and NVS2700 both pack large internal storage – starting at 160GB and ramping up to 500GB; 2TB drives are theoretically supported – and have 2.7-inch LCD displays which not only show the progress of sucking RAW, JPEG and video footage from your camera memory cards, but can preview those photos and footage too.
Video demos after the cut
Seagate have become the latest hard-drive manufacturer to push out a USB 3.0 external HDD, in the shape of the Seagate BlackArmor PS110, and since they know that most users probably won’t have a USB 3.0 port on their existing notebook they’ve thrown in a “portable external hard drive performance kit” too. The kit includes the 500GB 7,200rpm PS110 external drive along with a PC Express card to add the requisite USB 3.0 port; once that’s slotted into place you can expect sustained data transfer speeds of 100MB/s.
Your eyes do not deceive you: that is a monkey, and it’s attempting to steal your LaCie Rikiki hard-drive. The grabby little simian has obviously spotted that LaCie’s new external drive is the most compact 2.5-inch model on the market, offering up to 640GB of capacity in an aluminum chassis.
“Rikiki”, meanwhile, is French for tiny, so the drive is a linguistics lesson as well as a place to offload your media files to. We’re not sure if the monkey is French – surely he’d be wearing a beret if that were the case.
Seagate have officially announced their indecently-skinny Momentus Thin hard-drive, which breaks a few records by virtue of its 7mm thickness. The 2.5-inch hard-drive is targeted at ultraportables and netbooks, and will offer 160GB and 250GB capacities along with 8MB of cache and a SATA 3.0Gb/sec interface.
Whether you use it for backup, for shuttling your media between computers or for archiving old files you can’t quite bring yourself to delete, an external hard drive is always handy. Seagate are celebrating their thirtieth anniversary this month, and they’ve given us a 640GB FreeAgent Go USB hard drive to give away to one SlashGear reader. Find out how to win after the cut.
LaCie seem to be going back and filling in any blanks in their mediaplayer line-up right now, neatly slotting the LaCinema Classic HD into the range. Coming somewhere in-between the non-HD LaCinema Classic and the HDD-free LaCinema Classic Bridge, the new device promises Full HD 1080p playback of various formats – including DivX, MKV, AVC and H.264 – from its 1TB internal hard-drive, together with DLNA media server support.
SlashGear JP
