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.

There’s been alot of news lately about hard drive security and data protection. A new portable hard drive enclosure from Sarotech, adds another layer of security. It’s called the “Cutie Bio” and I think it has watched one too many spy movies. They’ve integrated a fingerprint scanner into an external USB 2.0 device. Just like James Bond, you can access your data with a simple swipe of your finger. Then once it’s no longer connected to the PC, the information becomes encrypted gibberish.

It’s not a bad deal, at $58.55. The only drawback here is that it works solely on Windows machines, leaving Mac owners out in the cold. They do have one that is Mac compatible and Linux-friendly, which uses the more expensive 1.8-inch drives, but availability is yet to be announced.

Information is a precious and delicate thing. Which is why we humans have a hard candy shell wrapped around our brain. If our gooey info-centers were just exposed on top of our heads, we would be in big trouble. And it’s not like you can back up grey matter.

Luckily hard drives can be backed up, though truthfully not very many people actually do it. Let’s say you back up all of that precious data onto an external hard drive. Good job! You are now on the road to information safety. But wait…What if your house burns down? Or you get flooded? Nothing you can do about those acts of God right? Wrong. Thanks to Maxtor teaming up with Sentry Group, you can now have a drive that is both fire resistant and waterproof. These drives can withstand 1550F degrees for about a half hour as well as spend up to a day submerged in water.

Western Digital is betting those seeking 2.5-inch, 9.5mm form factor hard drives (notebook computers, portable storage devices) want larger storage options for their data needs. To this end the company has just introduced the WD Scorpio 320GB hard drive, priced at around $200.

The WD Scorpio 320GB hard drive offers up a rather speed performance time of 3Gb/s transfer rate. It reportedly is also extremely quiet for a 5400 RPM drive of its type because of special WD seeking algorithms. You also get your typical shock guard protection and a secondary technology which “calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration.”

Toshiba apparently has some designs on offering the largest capacity, small form factor external hard drives on the market. It has just announced the new Toshiba 250GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive, priced at around $190.

The Toshiba 250GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive is, yes, 250GB is size. That’s enough to hold, says Toshiba, up to either 71,000 digital photos, 65,000 MP3 music files, 110 hours of DVD videos or 29 hours of high-definition videos. The company also claims this specific drive is the largest capacity of its form factor available at the moment.

A new PC backup solutions company has surfaced claiming its device takes the complexity out of doing backups of your critical computer data. Rebit is the company name and its offering backup devices in various memory configurations which sport the name of the company.

The Rebit device is designed to attach to your computer through an available USB port. Once attached, Rebit claims, you can forget about worrying over complex backup software and scheduling. The Windows-based product does “complete and continuous backup of not only data, but applications and the entire operating system.” If your PC should tank or you need to restore a file or folder you can drag and drop or automatically restore said data from Rebit.

Take a look at this. The picture pretty much says it all but I’ll explain some anyway. This is the SATA HDD Stage Rack which is compatible with PC and Mac and connects through USB 2.0 to your computer. By simply plugging in your hard drive like it was some old-school Atari game the drive shows up on your computer. It supports 3.5″ and 2.5″ drives and does require an external power connection to spin the drive in addition to the USB cable.

I have a drawer full of hard drives from different upgrades where occasionally I need to access. Opening your PC is a real pain and putting it in an enclosure isn’t a whole lot better. Up until now I, like a lot of people, have been using a SATA to USB adapter cable which works pretty slick but doesn’t hold a candle to how cool this hard drive dock looks.

This week the news seems to be all about hard drive manufacturers pushing the limits and getting big results. Today Western Digital announced that it broke a record for hard drive density. They accomplished the milestone by using their own perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR)/tunneling magneto-resistive (TuMR) technology, and achieved 520 Gb/in2 areal density in a demonstration. Why is this important? Because, this is the highest density ever reached using continuous media. It produces a 3.5-inch hard drive that stores 640 GB per platter as well as single hard drive capacities as large as 3 TB. If you are doing the math, that’s more than double today’s max of 200 GB per square inch.

Following an earlier demonstration in California, they announced the news this week at the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference in Tokyo. As usual you won’t be able to get one overnight.(Though that would be nice.) They estimate a release date sometime in 2010.

Hitachi today announced another step forward in packing more data into the same sized hard disks with what is now the world’s smallest read-head technology for hard disks. While others (Hitachi themselves included) are starting to turn to solid state drives or hybrid drives with advantages of moving parts, faster response times and less power consumption, Hitachi continues to make advances on the HDD front stating it continues to provide a better capacity to cost ratio than other technologies.

The concept of the RAM disk has been around for a while but due to expense and limitations are virtually unheard of in practical use. FusionIo, with its revolutionary ioMemory technology, intends to change all this and bridge the gap of limitations between current storage and memory technologies with the innovative new ioDrive.

The ioDrive, with a catch phrase “The power of a SAN in the palm of your hand”, operates on the PCI-Express x4 bus with access rates approaching DRAM with a sustained 600 and 800 MBytes/s write and read operations respectively. Aside from the high speed, small packet transfer feature of the drive, ioDrives require no RAID controller to provide redundancy between drives, there are no moving parts and they use industry standard form factor and interface.

Today Seagate took the wraps off of their first hybrid notebook hard drive featuring a combination of standard hard drive storage and Flash memory. The Momentus 5400 PSD features only a 5400 rpm spindle but promises faster system response times along with extended notebook battery life and better storage reliability. We’ve seen hybrid drives like these in the past with Samsung and Hitachi, and improved speed and efficiency through this type of storage combo is likely to be the standard in coming years.

The 2.5 inch drive utilizes 256MB of Flash-based memory for storing data that’s frequently accessed providing a quicker responses and through this also requires less drive disk access, cutting the power consumption of the drive more than in half. Having the additional quick-access memory also aids in faster OS boot times according to the company.

You want one backup device which supports multiple interfaces for backing up data and can store a lot of information. LaCie thinks it may have the answer with its new LaCie 2big Triple, available in October at a starting price of around $400.

The LaCie 2big Triple is available in 1, 1.5 and 2TB versions via a two-disk RAID design. 2big Triple supports FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0. It’s pre-formatted for Mac users, though it can be converted easily to Windows. Backups can be done via a one-touch process and the drive sports a natural cooling heat sink metal design.

Alienware continues to break ground with its notebooks as the company is now boasting the first consumer-available portable system that comes with an internal 320GB hard drive. What can you do with 320GB? Well, according to Alienware you’re looking at up to 53 games, 80 movies or over 81,000 songs giving you an estimated 339 days of continuous music.

The company is offering the 15.4-inch Area-51 m1550, the 17-inch Aurora m9700 and the Area-51 m9750 with the new, larger 5400RPM hard drives. Since the 17-inch models have dual drive bays you can even double that and have two drives either separate or in a RAID array. They also have the option of paring with SSD drives to give you the best of both worlds in storage and speed.

Aesthetics are not something people usually talk about when it comes to Hard Drives and portable storage devices, but would you rather have a clunky box sitting on your desk or a slick looking portable storage device like the LaCie devices pictured here? Designed by renowned designer Sam Hecht, this new line of machines do what they’re told and look good doing it.

The LaCie Little Disk line will provide a capacity of 30 to 250GB in 1.8 inch and 2.5 inch drives both of which support the USB 2.0 interface. Additionally the 2.5 inch version will be available with Firewire connectivity and a one-click synchronization and back up function. The drives are available now with prices starting at $90 USD.

Western Digital has unveiled some new features and a new look to its line of external My Book hard drives. The Home Edition, Office Edition and Essential Edition 2.0 all offer up to 1TB of data storage along with a compact design and are smart enough to power themselves off when you computer shuts down.

Both the Home and Office editions have also traded in the light ring on the front for a straight bar that not only indicates power but gives you an estimate of available capacity at a glance. They also house a backup feature that will automatically back up anything that’s saved to it.