Flash drives can offer the business user or government employee a great way to carry needed documents and files with them on the go or to meetings at remote offices. The catch with a flash drive is that if it is lost and not encrypted the data on the drive can fall into the wrong hands.

Lexar introduced the latest flash drive in its line today called the JumpDrive Solo Vault with FIPS Validation. FIPS stands for Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2 Level 1 security software is used on the drive without the need for centralized management.

Early this month OCZ announced its Core Series SSDs that brought pricing for SSD drives to significantly lower levels. Granted the SSDs in the Core series are still more than standard hard drives, but the savings compared to other SSDs on the market is very significant.

Laptop Magazine got its hands on a 64GB Core Series SSD and ran some tests to see how well the cut price SSD stacks up to more expensive SSDs and normal hard drives. The average read rate for the Core SSD was 112.4MBps and it had an average seek time of 1ms on Sisoft Sandra tests. HD Tach showed that the drive had an average read score of 89.5MBps and a seek time of 0.5ms.

I guess to some users a flash drive is a fashion accessory since they come in all sorts of colors and a few different styles. You can look at the Mimobot’s to see that some people like to collect flash drives for more than merely storing their music or porn.

Super Talent has announced its latest flash drive that is tiny and covered in 24k gold plate. The little drive is called the Super Talent PICO-C gold and packs 8GB of storage into a 31.3mm x 12.4mm x 3.4mm package.

Iomega has released a new drive called the Camo eGo hard drive for those that may want to stand out from the crowd at the office but blend in with the forest. The new eGo portable hard drive is powered solely by USB 2.0 and has a very decent capacity of 250GB inside its camouflaged frame.

The drive is also surrounded with a black “Power Grip” to help keep a hand-hold on it, but if you do end up losing your grip you can hope that the DropGuard technology does all that is says for drops up to 5 feet. The eGo Camo Portable drive is compatible with Windows Vista/XP/2000 and Max OS X.

Dr. Stuart Parkin and colleagues at IBM have recently published a paper in Science introducing a new type of storage technology dubbed ‘racetrack memory’.

The memory uses something called spintronics which uses the storage of bits generated by the magnetic spin of electrons rather than their charge to identify each as “on” or “off”. This new storage solution offers some advantages over the most popular current options. It’s faster than traditional hard disk drives and has a lower failure rate since there are no moving parts.

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.