Western Digital (WD) unveiled today what it is calling the world’s fastest SATA hard drive. It is known as the WD VelociRaptor and you can expect it to cost you around $300 when it hits retail.

The WD VelociRaptor hard drive is a 2.5-inch, 300 GB model which WD says is 35 percent faster then the previous fastest model. Technical features of this upgrade from the WD Raptor include 10,000 RPM, SATA 3 GB/s interface and a 16 MB cache.

A notebook hard drive sporting 320GB isn’t a new capacity and there are larger notebook drives available right now. However, what is interesting about the new 320GB Fujitsu MHZ2 BJ series notebook drive is that it spins at 7200 RPM.

Typically when a notebook hard drive gets into higher capacities it has to slow down to 5400 RPM or even less for some drives. Not so with the new Fujitsu drive, it gets to spin at full speed. Fujitsu says that the drive has an average latency time of 4.17ms and has a read seek time of 10.5ms and a write seek time of 12ms.

Let’s say you pulled that old 40GB hard drive out of your notebook and replaced it with 160GB of storage. Ever wish you could do something else with the leftover drive, instead of throwing it away? Now you can. Just stick it in an enclosure and turn it into a portable USB hard drive.

Meritline.com has an enclosure for just $10.99 shipped (after entering coupon code HW1971413OFF, which expires 1/25). It’s compatible with all 2.5-inch IDE and SATA drives, and includes both IDE and SATA external interfaces (with cables). You also get a carrying case and a little screwdriver so you can open and close the enclosure. The drive itself is powered entirely by the interface, so you don’t have to use an AC adapter. Best of all you’re recycling and not throwing the old drive away and crapping up the environment.

We’ve seen some pretty handy adapters to connect your internal drives, externally to your computer with things like the Stage Rack and this USB to SATA adapter but none of them match the convenience of the USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter from NewerTech. This adapter not only connects SATA drives to your computer’s USB port, but it will handle ATA/IDE drives as well.

Anytime I upgrade computers or just upgrade my drive I always keep the old one because inevitably a day will come where I want something off of it that I thought I would never need again. Opening up the computer case is a real pain and adapters like this are well worth the money in the time it saves alone. The adapter works with all 2.5″ laptop drives, 3.5″ desktop drives and will connect any existing 5.25″ drives such as CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs or removable Iomega Zip drives.

Hitachi is upping the stakes in notebook hard drive storage sizes as CES approaches by unveiling today the world’s highest capacity 2.5-inch mobile hard drive. Expect to see the new 500GB Travelstar 5K500 showing up in laptops sometime in February.

The Hitachi Travelstar 5K500, which will also be available in a slightly smaller 400GB model, is the company’s fourth generation mobile drive to use perpendicular magnetic recording technology. In exact storage terms you can fit on the 500GB drive up to 500 hours of digital video, 178 feature length movies, 250 games or 125,000 four-minute songs. These drives will be available with a 3.0Gb/s Serial ATA (SATA) interface and will include vibration protection technology against bumps which might impact system performance.

Most of us have replaced a hard drive and have been forced to reinstall the OS and everything else. It’s a time consuming process when you think about all o. Typically only big companies have the software to clone your old drive to the new. Apricorn wants to change that. That’s why theyre bundling their DriveWire universal hard drive adapter with their EZ Gig II cloning software.

The DriveWire HDD adapter allows you to connect any drive, SATA or PATA to your computer through the USB port and access the data on the drive. The big difference here is that their EZ Gig II software is a bootable CD and lets you clone the drive connected via the HDD adapter.

Pexagon Technology, a developer of personal storage solutions, is offering now for sale what it is describing as the world’s first personalized 250GB portable hard drive. This offering is part of Pexagon’s Store-It Colors hard drive line and it is priced at around $200.

This Pexagon 250GB hard drive can be customized via a free custom laser engraving service. With it one can put personalized text or a logo to create a “unique and identifiable solution.” The drive itself is a pocket sized model which holds a 2.5-inch hard drive and is USB 2.0 compatible.

This isn’t your typical external HD design, by any means. With this USB HD concept from Green Banana you won’t just be storing your info mindlessly. You will have something cool to occupy your eyes. The drive has an OLED screen, the design on the screen changes depending on the contents of the drive. Each file is represented on screen by a shape that is proportional to the filesize.

As you add more files, the shapes diversify. It doesn’t just look pretty, it can help you manage your drive better, allowing you to see how much space is left on your drive easily, and how it is being used. Think of it as art created from your data. For the moment, it remains but a concept, but if you like the idea, you can download a free copy of the software that the display is based on.

The HyperDrive4 SSD is the fastest internal HD in existence. It fits into a standard 5.25″ bay using an IDE or SATA connector. No conventional NAND flash ram here, it uses up to 8 DDR sticks at 2 gigs each.

Not impressed? To quote Yoda, “You will be.” The manufacturers claim that the HyperDrive4 can get files 8,000x faster than a 10,000 RPM HD, and serve them 125x faster. What that means is you can fully install Windows XP in about 7 minutes. It will go from boot to desktop in 2 seconds flat. There is one large drawback though, not including the $5000 price for the 16 GB version. The memory is volatile, which means in order to retain data, it has to be powered on all the time.

Sang Hoon Lee has designed a new portable hard disk drive that truly looks good enough to eat. Mmmmm Chocolate. The chocolate bar hard drive is non-edible and comprised of modular flash drives, and the central hub features a built in touchscreen. The touchscreen can be used to view and organize all of your various files.

The idea here is that files could be organized any way you want and you can take the sections with you in your pocket, to use on another computer. That’s nothing we can’t do already, but it’s the design that’s cool. It’s a fun and unique concept. Whether it is worth using in the real world remains to be seen, but it sure makes me hungry.

Maybe you’ve got a thing for Hannah Montana websites. Or maybe you’re just super paranoid. To protect your data, you could take apart the hard drive and have some pretty cool parts to remember it by. A better answer is the eRazer. It could be your new best friend.

It’s a stand alone device that doesn’t require a functioning computer to use it. It can erase all the files on a drive by writing a data pattern over the entire disk. They claim it will clean a 250GB drive in just short of two hours. The price is $100. If you are still paranoid that someone will discover your dirty secrets, you can spend an extra $50 to get one that makes multiple passes on the disk and writes random characters over all of it.

LaCie has put out its share of interesting looking external drives like the Sam Hecht designers and of course that golden number, and they’ve now added to the lineup with this minimalist design from Neil Poulton.

The LaCie Hard Disk, named as simple as it looks, consists of an unobtrusive smooth black box with few distinguishing marks other than the cool blue LED strip (everyone likes cool blue LED strips) on the underbelly and the LaCie brand name on the side. The company says it even runs quietly and cool since it has no fan and uses a “smart” heat dissipation design.

If you thought you had a big drive in a small package with Western Digital’s 250GB Passport you can think again. Hopefully you’ve come to expect it these days because soon after you get the biggest and the best something else will come along to out-do it.

WD has announced the launch of the latest in their line of the sleek, portable Passport drives with this one boasting a massive 320GB capacity of storage that is small enough to fit in your shirt pocket. The whole drive and enclosure weigh under a quarter of a pound does not require an external power source. The drive gets its power and transfers data through a single USB 2.0 connection and gives a 480 Mbps transfer speed (which will take you an hour and a half to fill the drive).

We all want to protect our data, but you really shouldn’t use a fingerprint reader. Someone can just knock you out or worse, take the finger. Instead, just enter a secret PIN number with the ezSECU ez850 external drive enclosure from IOTEK. It will ask you for the special PIN number each time you access it.

It’s compact and easy to take with you since it only supports 2.5 inch SATA hard drives. I’m assuming that it uses a rechargeable battery to power the screen. It’s size is 79.5 x 129.7 x 23mm and it’s compatible with Windows 2000/XP/Vista and Mac OS 9.2 and beyond. Nice looking, isn’t it? It could save your fingers.

Because of all the attention gained by the HDD Stage Rack which gives users a convenient “dock” for their hard drives, Logitec has answered with a version of their own. The eSata HDD Cradle from Logitec seems to work very similarly to the Stage Rack supporting 2.5″ and 3.5″ SATA hard drives, but no IDE. This model also looks a little bit more stylish and additionally houses a 4-port USB hub through it’s existing USB connection, making it a little more useful.

GeekStuff4U has the Logitec hard drive cradle available for pre-order now priced at $72.31 and will start shipping at the end of December, but unfortunately without support for IDE it doesn’t look like it adds much more value for it’s significantly higher price.