I must admit that most external hard drive enclosures today resemble nothing more than a melted hunk of plastic or metal. Why not get a little creative and rip off Etsy user NES Box. He shoves external hard drives inside of old NES cartridges which give your computer a real retro feel. Need to back up right now? This Super Mario Brothers 3 hard drive can be had for $180 on Etsy and it runs from USB power. Not bad, but we’d recommend trying to make your own. An old Duck Hunt cartridge and a Dremel is all it takes to whip one up. That and a hard disk of course.

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Computing isn’t always about raw power and trying to build the best gaming rig out there. Sometimes the simple bare necessities will suffice.  Lenovo’s first netbook, the IdeaPad S10-42312CU, comes with all the bare necessities you’ll ever need to surf the web.

Featuring a 10.2-inch 1024×600 widescreen display, an Intel Atom N270 single core processor running at 1.6GHz, GMA 950 integrated graphics and Windows XP Home, this netbook packs quite the punch considering it only weighs 2.65 pounds. This specific model comes with 512MB of DDR2 memory and an 80GB hard drive, but other models will be available later with more RAM, hard drive space and a variety of colors. Unfortunately, it only comes with a 3-cell battery, but on the bright side the keyboard is 85-percent of the size of a full-sized laptop keyboard, meaning this thing is pretty damn small. Hopefully it doesn’t use up too much juice. It’s available now for an eye-popping $439 dollar price tag. Don’t forget to slap a warranty on that.

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This computer sure is tiny. Fit-PC Slim is the ultimate mini-rig for anyone who isn’t satisfied with USB drives as a means of transporting data. It’s dimensions are 110 x 100 x 30mm and it packs a mean 500MHz AMD Geode LX800 processor, Ethernet jack, VGA output, WiFi, and a 2.5-inch hard drive option for taking data on the go.

Two sizes of memory are available: 256MB or 512MB. Obviously, depending on how much memory and/or hard drive space you want to put into this thing, the price could range from $220 to $335 and you’ll also need some tiny speakers to match. Be careful not to leave it around the house, though. I’d hate to hear that you crushed your three hundred dollar computer just because you weren’t watching where you step.

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Saying you’re into saving the Earth is the best way to score pussy nowadays. After all, after Al Gore’s movie and the Prius, every company is looking for a way to market something as “green.” A company called Fabrik will be releasing what is being dubbed the world’s most eco-friendly external hard drive, as if you cared.

The SimpleTech [re]drive uses Turbo USB 2.0, which is supposedly hella fast, for reading and writing. The casing is made from bamboo and aluminum and 100-percent recycled materials. At $160 for 500GB, it’s not the worst deal in the world and it might get you laid.

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External hard drives never really become a personal affair. For the most part, we buy them to add additional storage to our computers because we just downloaded 100GB of pornography off a Bit Torrent site. Rather than have our OS slow to a crawl and our storage shrink to the size of an appendix, we simply copy all the tits and dicks over and our objective is fulfilled.

However, not everyone in this world is a complete slob and I hear some people actually have clean, organized PC setups. That’s where Hardbox comes in. It’s a beautiful looking hard drive enclosure that resembles a book written by Dracula himself. It takes any 3.5″ SATA hard disk and uses the fake pages as a heat-sink to eliminate the need for a fan. Hooks up via USB and can be yours for $300.

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The external hard drive market has done fairly well lately, but there has always been that problem of the USB 2.0 speeds. USB is fine when transfering a few photos or the likes, but what about when you want to move gigabytes of movies? USB just doesn’t cut it. The new Western Digial My Book drive integrates what is called external SATA technology to defeat these speed problems. The drive is able of reaching bursts of up to 300MB per second; that’s 5x faster than the USB burst speed of 60MB. The drives are selling for $179 and $229, and come in capacities of 320 and 500GB. If you are looking for a super fast external hard drive, this is it. –Nik Gomez

Western Digital rolls out My Book drive with eSATA [via Electronista]

Perpendicular magnetic recording has allowed for some major breakthroughs in hard drive capacity as of late. Next in line: Samsung’s SpinPoint N series. What makes it so important is that it is the first single platter 1.8-inch hard drive to reach the 60GB capacity. The SpinPoint N series will have 4 tiers of storage: 20/30/40/60GB. While a single platter 60GB drive will help shrink the size of some portable audio devices, it will also up the ante for high capacity portables. This means that your iPod that you thought was so great at 80GB can now be upped to 120GB (if they are able to make a double platter drive). For your ever growing music collection, we can do nothing but welcome these newer, higher capacity drives! — Nik Gomez

Samsung creates 60GB, iPod-ready HD with one platter [Electronista]

Flash memory is basically always better than the moving parts in a disk drive. The main draw back has been that flash just can’t keep up with the immense expansion that is going on in the disk drive market with the recent release of a 1TB drive. Hopefully, flash memory will get a kick in the butt so that we won’t have to worry so much about dropping our audio players and killing the hard drive. PQI has reintroduced their amazing solid state 64GB drive that will ship in the form of a 2.5″ Serial ATA hard drive. This kind of flash storage is perfect for notebooks because of the limitations of size in a notebook. These limits constrict how large a disk drive may be and how many platters it may have. A 64GB drive is very respectable right now, but still not quite up to par with the 100GB drives we are seeing. Another feature that flash memory has over moving disk drives is the amounto f data it is able to transfer at great speeds. PQI is claiming 100MB/sec peak transfer rate with this new solid state drive. Unfortunately, look for pricing to be well above the $600 that the SanDisc 32GB drive currently retails for. — Nik Gomez

PQI reintroduces 64 GB flash drive [Electronista]

Four! That’s how many patters the new Seagate hard drive will have when it comes out in the first half of 2007. Why four? Well, right now there is 250GB of storage per platter (which is why the three platter disks are maxing out at 750GB), and this new hard drive is planned to be an entire terabyte. That’s right, 1TB for your media storage needs. So, is it going overboard? Definatly not. As longs as the hardware works and there is a demand (which there is), there should be no reason why it shouldn’t be produced. As hard drives get bigger and media quality (and file size) is skyrocketing, one of the biggest restraints on us is the speed with which we can transfer this data. Whether over the internet, or from hard drive to hard drive, transfer speeds need to get a kick in the pants. This new 1TB hard drive is said to feature a rugged, shock-absorbing design and be fairly quiet. That’s to safeguard your data just in case you happen to die on your favorite game and kick your computer. No pricing details, but it will probably be (and logically should be) well under the cost for two 500GB hard drives.

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Passwords are getting so old. Aren’t you sick and tired of trying to remember what the passwords are for that account you created last year, but are only now getting around to using it? And last year you had a couple different passwords, but you cant remember whether which password from last year it was. Well, the Savit Micro DataMore V2 FPR won’t help you remember your Gmail password, but it does use your fingerprint to safeguard all of your goods on a nice little hard drive. While there is no word on capacity, it has been reported to support up to 480Mbps data transmission speed. Also nice, it comes in an aluminum case for efficient heat transfer; those 2.5-inchers do run hotter than the 1.8-incher in your MP3 player. It connects to your PC via USB, and it has an independent power switch, meaning it isn’t turned on by your computer. Why is this nice? Because it won’t kill the drive if you have a power surge. It will be coming out in two models: the VPR & the eSATA. The difference between the two is probably capacity related, but nothing official.

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