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.

Link (via)

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]

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]

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.

(more…)