Western Digital (WD) today kicked out some new portable USB hard drives which look good and are easy to carry. They are known as the My Passport Elite Portable USB Drives and are available in two sizes: 250 GB (around $170) and 320 GB (around $200).

WD’s My Passport Elite drives connect to a USB port to transfer data back and forth and are also USB-bus powered, so they don’t need their own power supply. They sport a soft-touch finish, weigh less than five ounces and come in multiple colors.

We all like our music without DRM and many places from iTunes to Wal-Mart are now offering tracks with no DRM. SanDisk announced that it will able be offering exclusive tracks that are DRM free pre-loaded onto microSD cards.

SanDisk says that it will promote more than 50 new and emerging artists on microSD cards to help launch the new 8GB Sansa Fuze PMP. The “Sansa Sessions” microSD card includes music across several genres including rock, pop, hip hop and the cards include music videos and photos from more than 30 record labels.

Most geeks can understand the allure of a SSD drive with much faster data access, read and write speeds. What most geeks can’t get behind is the huge price premium you pay for the SSD when compared to a traditional hard drive and the amount of storage space you give up.

Today a typical hard drives in a computer are at least 80GB, even in tiny ultra portable systems. If you opt for a SSD you typically get 32MB, though some larger SSD drives are available like the 832 GB BiTMICRO SSD from CES 2008.

There are a few things most of us would like to have on our notebook computers including longer battery life, more performance and more storage capacity. Samsung can’t really help with the first two items I mentioned, but it can help with the storage space issue. Samsung announced today that it is now shipping its Spinpoint M6 500GB hard drive for notebooks.

The new 500GB M6 drive sports a trio of platters that each has 167GB of storage space packed into a 2.5-inch frame designed specifically for use in notebook systems. The drive is only 9.5mm in height and uses the SATA 3.0Gbps interface, making it a direct upgrade for many notebook users.

Apple’s Time Capsule just started shipping a couple of days ago and someone has already taken the liberty to tear it apart. A user called nakedmac posted his pictures of flickr of him voiding his warranty just to see what makes the Time Capsule tick. Thanks for sharing!

SanDisk put out a set of new USB drives that don’t pack much uniqueness on the inside but attempt to set themselves apart with some unique designs on the outside. According to SanDisk, the Cruzer Tag Drives add a little “funky” fun to your run-of-the-mill Flash-based storage.

For anyone that had pre-ordered Apple’s Time Capsule appliance, AppleInsider has gotten word from a number of folks that the device is now shipping, making Jobs’ promise of a February ship date by just a day. This was indicated by credit cards being charged and online order statuses changing. Gizmodo has also gotten confirmation from Apple that the device is indeed shipping, bringing some wireless and automatic Time Machine backups to Macs everywhere.

NextoDi brought a couple of new products to the PMA show in Las Vegas this year with one of them being an upgraded media storage device with support for eSATA drives and just about every media card you can think of. Until you get your hands on a few 32GB media cards the Nexto Extreme ND2700 works well for transferring and storing data from the smaller media in your digital camera and camcorder while on the go.

The ND2700 also uses NextoDI’s X-Copy technology delivering backup speeds as fast as 40 seconds for 1GB. The USB connection makes transferring data even easier by connecting to your camera directly without having to remove the media card. A sampling of those media cards supported by the Nexto Extreme include CF, SD, SDHC, MMC and a whole array of Memory Sticks. NextoDI didn’t have any information quite yet on pricing or availability.

WD launched the new My Passport Essential USB hard drive today with a new glossy look created to go along with the design of the company’s popular My Book hard drives. Like the My Book, the small new Essential drives have that “book” look to them with a bull-nose “binding” on one side.

But, aside from the new glossy digs this drive is still pretty much the same small pocket-sized portable drive that’s powered solely from its USB connection. It comes in sizes of 160GB, 250GB and 320GB with the largest capacity launching with a price tag of a penny under $200. They also come with some software to automatically sync up and store data from your computer along with some Google tools.

As part of the announcements at the MacWorld keynote speech today, Steve Jobs introduced the new Apple Time Capsule - a appliance designed to help facilitate wireless, automatic data backups from all the Macs in your home. The device works with machines running the Leopard OS along with the Time Machine software to automatically create back ups of everything on your Mac computer, hourly if you would prefer, and from multiple different Macs.

The Time Capsule coincides well with the launch of the MacBook Air since one of the common needs for an optical drive is to back up data. Since the Air doesn’t have an internal CD or DVD drive the Time Capsule makes a nice solution to provide wireless data backups to the notebook. The integrated software lets users look through history for lost files or even restore the system to a previous point in time.

The Roland CD-2e personal SD/CD recorder would be useful for those who can not figure out the simple task of recording their voice or music onto CDs directly without needing to use a computer.

The CD-2e comes with a built-in mic. You can easily adjust pitch, key and tempo while you’re recording. It even has a metronome for improving timing and rhythm and stereo speakers. It can record directly to CD, but also provides an option to use SD if you want more capacity. For instance, using an 8 GB SDHC card will let you have up to 12 hours of recording time.

Buffalo has recently added the LinkStation Pro Duo as one of the latest to their lineup of NAS products, targeting small or home businesses in need of an affordable and stable solution for large capacity data storage.

The Pro Duo currently comes in a 1TB configuration with the option of either RAID 0 or RAID 1 redundant 3.5″ SATA drives. It connects to your network via 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet as an Active Directory client and also has Buffalo’s Web Access technology allowing you to access data stored on the drive remotely from anywhere via the web. It even has included software that lets you start it up remotely.

LaCie today announced at CES 2008, the new Little Big Disk Quadra, an ultra fast mobile disk designed for speed-intensive and capacity-demanding applications, like digital content creation, high-volume data exchange, and video editing, while on the move. The Little Big Disk is designed to run quietly and has superior heat dissipation with an integrated fanless cooling system. The aluminum heat-sink design also ensures superior reliability.

The Little Big Disk Quadra will be available in 400GB and 500GB versions with your choice of either 7200 or 5400 RPM drives, respectively. A quadruple interface allows universal connectivity for cross-platform compatibility.

According to a press release, BiTMICRO will be amazing some people for sure, with their new 2.5-inch solid-state drive with an amazing 832GB of NAND flash. The 3Gb SATA drive is a new addition to their E-Disk Altima line, and uses a technology they are calling multi-level cell (or MLC) memory, which doubles the number of bits stored per memory cell when compared with single-level cell (SLC) NAND. Apparently this increases data density and allows them to keep the price low.

Looks like they will be shipping in the 3rd quarter of 2008. That’s when we should see capacities ranging from 32GB all the way up to 832GB.

The CompactFlash Association will be unveiling a CFast connector package at CES 2008, and the SATA interface will give you data rates up to 3Gb per sec. That’s quite a jump over the current 133MB/second that PATA provides right now. As usual, there is no word yet as to when it will hit store shelves after CES 2008.

Mr. Shigeto Kanda of Canon and the CFA chairman of the board thinks that “The development of a CompactFlash card with a SATA interface will maintain the dominance of CompactFlash in the non-consumer (embedded systems, single board computers, data recorder, etc.) markets as well as promote its use in other applications such as digital SLR cameras and professional video cameras.”