The number of external hard drives on the market is staggering. The drives can be had in a huge range of capacities and styles to match the needs of the end user. Many external hard drives with higher capacities are used to back up data from computers on a network and to store movies and other content.

Samsung has announced a new special edition of its S2 Portable hard drive. The drive has 500GB of storage space and will launch alongside the DVD and Blu-ray version of the Michael Jackson THIS IS IT film on February 22. The drive will have a digital copy of the movie pre-loaded.

The drive will also ship with Samsung software for backing up data in real-time or on a schedule called Samsung Auto Backup. The drive also includes SecretZone software for encrypting the backup data. The special edition drive will be offered in Europe to start with and may come to other countries later.

Samsung