A new product in the My Book Studio line has been released by Western Digital. As expected we’re getting two RAID 0 drives in a quad-interface external case that has got itself a new design and upgraded Green Power units drives to run cooler and to consume less power. There are good things for Mac users, too, because the new My Book Studio Edition II is HFS+ formatted.

It’s already available with 1TB and 2TB space for $349 and $599 respectively.

Press release

I’m not sure if I need an elastic USB flash memory drive because I don’t have a habit of accidentally rip it out or knock off. However, looking at the pictures this is a pretty interesting concept by Serbian designer Damjan Stankovic. It’s called the USBee and has the ability to bend in any direction, features a vented housing for cooling and a detachable protective cap.

The USBee flash memory drive won the 1st place at the MS Industrial USB Competition which was held by Serbian Design Community forum DizajnZona and I think it has a lot of potential to go into production.

via YankoDesign

A mix between new hardware and “going green” is always a good thing. Western Digital managed to come out with two GreenPower hard drives that are supposed to be cool, quiet and eco-friendly: the 1TB Caviar GP and the 1TB RE2-GP.

“WD’s GreenPower platform is the first 3.5-inch hard drive platform designed with power savings as the primary attribute. GreenPower drives from WD deliver average drive power savings of 4-5 watts over competitors’ drives, ultra-cool, quiet operation and solid performance.”

They both work on a SATA 3Gbps interface and have a 16MB buffer. The Caviar consumes 7.5Watts when working and 4 Watts when idle while the Re2 version consumes 7.4 Watts, respectively 4.0 Watts. Both have a stand-by power consumption of 0.97 Watts.

The 1TB Caviar GP has a 3 years warrany while the 1TB RE2-GP has 5.

via HotHardware

The 3Gbps SATA-equipped MHZ2 BJ from Fujitsu, is world’s first 320GB laptop drive that spins at 7,200 rpm. It’s a standard 9.5-mm in size, with 16MB of cache, 25dB noise levels (important for a laptop) when idle and seek time 10.5-ms for reads and 12.5-ms for writes. The new Fujitsu MHZ2 BJ will start shipping from June, so stay tuned.via Impress

Western Digital managed to come up with a new two-platter 640GB, 3.5-inch hard drive, which is a lot cooler, quieter and much more economical. Oh I missed the fact that they are much faster? Dubbed WD Caviar SE16, it has two 320GB platters, gets up to 3GBps and should be available from today for $140.

via Gearlog

The Koreans from Mtron announced today that they’ve managed to develop a new 1.8-inch hard drive in their SSD line. They are proudly telling us that a faster 128GB SSD is in the works using the Single Level Cell (SLC) technology instead of the denser but slower Multi Level Cell (MLC) technology.

The new Mtron 128GB SSD is supposed to be able to read at 120MBps and write at 100MBps. Since it’s a SSD which means it has less moving parts power consumption is cut in half. Al-Gore fans, that’s a good thing, right?

I can only find one problem here. What if your desktop computer is not fast enough to keep up with it, because this baby is able to write six times faster than a normal HDD! We’ll find out more about it in April, when it’s going to be released. So far I have no price for it, but it should be expensive.

Electronista

I anticipated that SSD prices will go down sooner or later. Until they do, BiTMICRO just announced the largest flash drive we’ve seen so far. It’s a 1.6TB Ultra320 SCSI SSD that can do 230 MBps transfer rates.

Though no price have been disclosed yet, I’m pretty confident I should work a few years to pay for it. Ubergizmo thinks you could buy a car with the money, what about you? Would it be THAT expensive?

SanDisk announced Thursday at the PMA 2008 trade show a new 32GB Ultra II SDHC card. The card comes as a savior for high quality digital cameras and camcorders which consume a lot of memory. The 32GB Ultra II SDHC card will go on sale in April for $350.

A 16GB version will be available in March for $180. Both products will come with the MicroMate USB card reader. The high speed cards offer 15MB/sec read/write speeds.

Besides those products, SanDisk has released a Video HD SDHC memory card. It comes with capacities of 4GB($80) or 8GB($140) and it is perfect for recording high-definition video. The card can capture all type qualities of video, including full High-Definition 1080 format so you can be sure it will suit your needs.

SanDisk rivals have announced 32GB SDHC cards too in January.

SanDisk via Crave

Parks Associates, an internationally recognized market research and consulting company has made a research about Storage Opportunities for Handheld Devices. The study reveals that 99% of mobile phones have a flash memory solution. Nevertheless there will be a notable market opportunity for HDD solutions used for this type of devices. In addition, 96% of cellphones will use flash memory by the end of 2012.

We all know that flash memory provides non-volatility, fast read times, and shock resistance. It is ideal for mobile phones, portable media players or digital cameras. However the increased requirements for storage will boost the technical research for the HDD solutions. More and more consumers demand improved storage devices that can meet their needs.

“These consumers will require greater storage, and the low cost per gigabyte will carve out a market opportunity in handheld devices for HDD memory,” said Parks Associates Analyst Chris Roden.

However, Samsung demonstrated it has the know-how to built an amazing 128GB flash memory card. Consequently the requirements for high capacity multimedia devices and mobile phones will be covered. On the other hand, a little shortcoming about the flash memory cards will encourage the development of new HDD memory solutions. And that is their lifetime.

Source

I know that uploading the photos to your favorite website or into the computer can be a boring operation. It happened many times for me to forget the photos in my camera just because I didn’t feel like doing it. Not it appears a solution called Eye-Fi wireless SD card.

The Eye-Fi card is a regular 2GB storage card with built-in Wi-Fi. It features a software that automatically upload photos when it reach a wireless hot-spot. If you get this gadget, you will surely forgot about cables and card readers. The cool thing about this card is you can upload the photos to your favorite social websites using the Eye-Fi Service. It works in a 90+ feet outdoors range and 45+ feet indoors range. To easily transfer the photos you need to have a free access Wi-Fi network or to have the passwords. The Eye-Fi card doesn’t work in commercial hot-spot like Starbucks for example.

You can buy the 2GB Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card for $100. It could be on your Christmas list, because the price is fair and it delivers a lot of functionality for your camera.

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