External storage is an important part of any backup strategy. No one wants to lose all the data on their computers in the event of an accident. Backing up data like documents, photos, music, video files, and other content on your PC is often best done to an external hard drive.

Seagate is one of the biggest names in external storage and today it announced its 2008 line of FreeAgent drives. The flagship drive of the line is the FreeAgent Go, which is only 12.5mm thick. The slim profile of the drive makes it the slimmest available today. Storage capacities are up to 500GB.

Many portable electronic devices that are used today store data from office documents to music and video files using SD storage in the form of full-size SD cards and microSD cards. The association that promotes the SD format — the SD Card Association — announced a new standard today for Embedded SD storage.

The new standard would allow manufacturers to embed SD memory inside devices like cameras, phones, and MP3 players. The new specification allows makers to build devices that have internal and external storage using the same specifications.

When many of us think of hard drives, we immediately think of notebook and desktop computers where storage capacities can reach into the terabyte level. Storage capacities are equally important for smaller devices like MP3 players and camcorders.

Toshiba has announced a new 1.8-inch hard drive today that is the world’s first dual disc 1.8-inch 240GB HDD and the world’s first 120GB single platter hard drive. The new 240GB HDD is Toshiba part number MK2431GAH. The drive spins at 4200 RPM and offers a 33% improvement in energy consumption compared to Toshiba’s 160GB 3600 rpm 1.8-inch drive.

The SSD offers some nice benefits to the notebook users like increased battery life, faster boot times, and quieter operation. The catch is that at this time SSDs are significantly more expensive than comparable hard drives and the storage capacity of the typical SSD is low.

Intel has jumped into the SSD market with the introduction of a pair of SSDs aimed at consumers. The new SSDs include the X18-M and the X25-M. The X18-M is a 1.8-inch drive and the X25-M is a more traditional 2.5-inch size drive. Intel says that the improved performance of the SSD helps reduce bottlenecks between its CPUs and the storage system. This is the SSD used in the HP system claiming 24-hours of runtime.

Nexcopy has introduced the new Secure Digital Duplicator, the SD200PC. It features advanced copy options, a small foot print and easy operation for an economical data loading and data distribution to SD flash memory. The idea is that this handy device will save you 100’s of hours in production time as well as 1,000’s of dollars in production costs. The software interface is supposed to be easy to use and it lets you copy up to 20 blank SD flash memory cards automatically. No “copy-n-paste” or single card loading. No hassles. It’s PC Based and will copy at maximum data transfer speeds.

External hard drives are a great way to protect important data stored on your computer in the event of a computer crash. The bad part about external storage is that the drives are typically small and easy to steal. That means if the data on the drive is sensitive, you might want to encrypt the data.

The catch with encrypting data is that the data is only as safe as your password. Aluratek has introduced a new Tornado plus external hard drive that features RFID keys. The drive can’t be accessed and the data stored on the drive won’t be unencrypted without first swiping one of the two included RFID keys.

The storage capacity of SDHC cards is growing greater all the time. I can remember only a few short years ago a 2 GB SDHC card was huge. Today that amount of storage will hold but a few full resolution photos from my DSLR camera. Things are even worse if you try to record HD video from my camcorder that uses SDHC storage.

Kingston announced the perfect SDHC storage card today for users of HD camcorders that record to SDHC cards. The new SDHC Elite Pro card from Kingston has 32 GB of storage. Kingston says 32 GB is enough storage for 6000 full 10-megapixel resolution digital images or over eight hours of full HD video recorded at 6 Mbps.

Newer Technology was busy this past week showing off a new  FireWire/USB hub for data storage. It is called the Newertech miniStack v2.5 and pricing, depending upon hard drive storage size, runs up to around $280 for 1TB.

The Newertech miniStack v2.5 is a FireWire 400/USB 2.0 powered hub storage solution, according to its maker. At its maximum storage offering of 1TB it can reportedly store upwards of 1 million JPEGs, 350,000 MP3s or 500 DVD quality movies.

When it comes to backing up data on our computers most of us never do it. The sheer amount of data that could be lost to a hard drive crash on most user’s computers is disturbing to think about. External hard drives are the storage solution of choice for users that have more data than a flash drive will hold or want an automated backup solution.

Addonics has a new external enclosure called the Portable Dual Drive Enclosure that supports dual hard drives and RAID configurations for even more data safety. The enclosure can hold dual 2.5-inch SATA hard drives 9 to 9.5mm in height. Using SATA-CF adapters, you the enclosure can also support up to four compact flash cards.

Micron is a big name in the flash memory and storage world. It announced a pair of new solid state drives (SSDs) today called the RealSSD P200 and the RealSSD C200. The two drives are aimed at distinctly different markets and use different technologies.

The RealSSD P200 has the performance, power, and reliability that are needed in the enterprise environment. The P200 uses Micron single-level cell NAND technology and uses a 2.5-inch form factor. Storage capacity for the P200 line ranges from 16GB to 128GB and the drives use the 3Gb/s SATA interface. Maximum read and write speed for the P200 line is 250MB/s. The P200 SSDs are good for up to 2 million hours mean time between failure.

It used to be that a portable hard drive had to be plugged into the wall AC outlet to be able to operate. Over time, some smaller capacity hard drives could be powered by the USB port totally, making them much more portable. Today even some larger capacity portable drives are powered by the USB port.

Memorex announced its new line of portable hard drives today that are completely USB powered. The line is called the Memorex Essential TravelDrive. All of the drives are 2.5-inch and are compatible with both Mac and PC systems and backup software is included with the drives.

There are many places in the military and enterprise environments where a standard 3.5-inch hard drive just won’t work. In the military, hard drives find their way into all sorts of applications from mobile command centers to aircraft where vibration and shock are big issues.

One provider of SATA hard drives — called Formation — has a hard drive that was designed especially for environments where a normal hard drive won’t work and the only alternative is expensive, and lower capacity SSDs. Formation has announced that it has doubled the capacity of its ToughDisk 3500 SATA Rugged hard drive.

Plain boring hard drives. We’ve all got one. But what if you could jazz up that hard drive and actually make a creative statement about your work area? The artists of Brazil’s Meninos design studio hate boring hard drives and they did something about it.

It all started when they made these custom pop art hard drive cases for friends. Now they are releasing them into the wild so everyone can enjoy them. Each external USB hard drive case is made by hand at their studio, using a custom acrylic case covered with a vinyl wrapper that features one of their designs. They’ll also make custom designs for you if you want to upload Adobe Illustrator art using their custom template. I like the Stormtrooper.

Everything seems to be going environmentally friendly today. You can get shirts made from recycled coke bottles at Wal-Mart if you want. Automakers are also spending billions to bring electric vehicles and alternative fuel vehicles to our roads. Even our computers are going green with hard drives that need less power.

Fabrik has announced what it claims to be the world’s most eco-friendly external hard drive today. The drive is called the SimpleTech [re]drive and it is said to be the world’s most energy-efficient, resource conscious external storage and backup drive. The drive uses Turbo USB 2.0 to connect to your PC, promising 25% more transfer speed than USB 2.0 alone.

Hard drives improve in two ways—they gain storage capacity and they get faster. Most hard drives spin at 7,200 RPM or 5,400 RPM, though there are faster drives out there. Western digital makes the fastest consumer hard drive on the market called the VelociRaptor that spins at 10,000 RPM.

Western Digital introduced the 300GB 10,000 RPM VelociRaptor in April. Today Western Digital announced a 2.5-inch enterprise version of the VelociRaptor that shares all the same features with the 3.5-inch consumer focused VelociRaptor.