TiVo kicked out today a service update for TiVo Series 3 and TiVo HD users which offers, among other new features, external storage support. The first verified external hard drive product to support this update is Western Digital’s $120 500GB My DVR Expander.

The new TiVo update is designed to work with E-SATA drives, specifically at the moment the Western Digital My DVR Expander. This 500GB hard drive can store up to 600 hours of standard-definition (SD) or up to 65 hours of high-definition (HD) television programming. It can also store broadband content that TiVo makes available through TiVoCast partners, including movie and TV downloads via Amazon Unbox on TiVo. The drive itself is available now.

Do you take way too many family pictures? Do you have photos in old shoe boxes and look at them far more then you should? Well, stop living in the past, flipping through that old bulky photo album. Now you have a big black box to imprison all of those cherished memories in, so they can survive for all eternity.

Officially making photo albums a thing of the past, and practically laughing at their out-datedness, Sony’s HDMS-S1D let’s you store and relive those memories. Thanks to Sony’s x-Pict Story HD(with face recognition), you can even add a soundtrack or have strange dream sequence fades between images. It will organize all of your images and let you share photos with slideshow and scrapbook-style displays.

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.

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.

How soon do you think the day will be when you can store as many movies to watch on a device smaller than the size of your average flash memory stick as you have on your iPod? 20 years? 10? If the breakthrough that was announced at the University of Pennsylvania is as big as the inventors claim it is, that day may be here before the end of the decade.

Scientists at the U of P have developed a way to create self-assembling nanowires from germanium antimony telluride. These tiny lengths are about 30 to 50 nanometers in diameter and 10 micrometers in length and are made by freezing chemicals at low temperatures, turning them into crystals. The technical stuff is hard to follow but the end result is a revolutionary new form of data storage memory that uses low power consumption (0.7mW per bit), fast read/write times (50 nanoseconds or about 1,000 times faster than the Flash-based memory devices used today) and won’t have any data corruption after 100,000 years of usage.

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s Apple news concerning the 80GB and 160GB iPods, Toshiba has just released its own news about two similar sized storage media units of its own. Sometime before the end of the year the ’shiba will release the MK model 80GB and 160GB 1.8-inch hard drives which, coincidentally, also happen to be the same memory size as the just-announced iPod Classic models. Except that there is no coincidence when it comes to technology, is there?

The 160GB drive will be Toshiba’s first that uses a CE-ATA interface while the 80GB unit employs PATA technology. Both drives have a storage density of 228 Gb per square inch. Speed wise the 80GB drive gets the edge (66 MB per second transfer rate) with the 160GB second (at 52 MB/s) but it uses less power for its functions.

Panasonic has announced that they’re going to be launching an SDHC card with a 16GB capacity this November. This capacity quadruples the amount of storage currently available on the companies largest available card.

Panasonic says that the new, higher capacity storage card will be able to handle data transfers as fast as 20MB/second to support real-time recording with high-definition cameras such as the Panasonic HDC-SD5 and allowing as much as 4 hours of 1080i video to be stored on a single SDHC card.

The idea behind this conceptual design is to provide an additional “safety net” of storage for your computers deleted items. The Tempo is an external 250GB (the site indicated Gb, but we’re guessing they meant bytes for this to be practical) hard drive that connects to your PC or Mac via Bluetooth and monitors your deleted items. Each time you delete files from your computer they are stored on the Tempo trash drive where they can be recovered if needed, providing you another layer of recovery for those accidentally deleted items.

The device itself is shaped like a little trash can that can sit on your desk withing Bluetooth range of your computer to wireless transfer the files. LED indicators on the Tempo drive light from the bottom up indicating at a glance how full the …

Proving USB drives can both be ugly and functional Corsair rolled out today the Flash Padlock. This manual security code dependent device is available in 1GB ($30) and 2GB ($40) capacities.

What is perhaps most interesting about the Corsair Flash Padlock is that you can set a PIN up to 10 digits long for accessing the drive’s contents. You have to then enter this PIN on the keypad built into the drive’s body. The Flash Padlock also seems noteworthy for its security feature of automatically locking itself when you remove it from an attached PC.

Network Attached Storage (NAS) for the purposes of sharing media across a home network is a category more and more computer companies seem to be wandering into. Newer Technology adds its own entry into the race with its new miniStack NAS.

The Newer Technology miniStack NAS, available in storage sizes up to 750GB and starting at around $120, is geared towards the home or small office network. Newer Technology says this NAS device, which connects with up to 20 Windows or Mac users, can stream multimedia files to compatible media players and only requires installation of a device driver to each connecting computer. One can also connect to the miniStack through USB 2.0.

Google has made it known that they will now be offering additional storage for their online applications, for a fee. Currently Google offers up to 1GB for Picasa Web Albums and as much as 2.8GB of storage for Gmail, all for free. When you reach your limit on the amount of storage space you now have the option of purchasing more which will apply across the different applications on your Google account.

The company is offering plans that start at $20/year for 6GB of additional storage and go up to $500 a year for 250GB. Right now the extra online storage will apply to Picasa Web Albums and Gmail, but in the future, according to Ryan Aquino, Google Software QA Engineer Lead, the storage will also be available for other online applications such as …

Iomega has definitely come a long way since the days of the Zip drive. Today the long time data storage equipment provider unveiled a new line of Iomega StorCenter Network Hard Drives, available in 1TB ($389), 750GB ($359) and 500GB ($269).

The Iomega StorCenter Network Hard Drives are designed for home office and small business networks. They offer features like media and print server capabilities, backup and disaster recovery software and compatibility with both Mac and Windows based computers. All three products use 3.5-inch 7200 RPM SATA-II hard drives with an 8MB cache and the 1TB unit is a two-drive product supporting RAID 0 (striping), RAID 1 (mirroring) and JBOD (which treats both drives as a large single drive).

How secure would you like your USB flash drive and its data to be? How about if it self-destructs (in the virtual sense) if tampered with? That’s the idea behind the new IronKey, a metallic flash drive available in 1GB, 2GB and 4GB storage capacities.

The IronKey offers on board hardware encryption which requires a password to unlock it. If someone attempts to tamper with it, the drive’s maker claims, “it will trigger a self-destruct sequence, ensuring data is kept confidential.” The drive itself is also secure, sporting a metal casing filled with epoxy to make it waterproof.

Other World Computing is looking to offer you some pretty serious home or business network attached storage options with its new NASPerform device. This NAS offering is available in five pre-configured solutions up to 750GB maximum and has a starting price of around $128.

The OWC NASPerform, available for both Mac and Windows based machines, can connect to a local network through Ethernet to offer storage and sharing of photos, music, movies and other data with up to 20 users. The NASPerform also comes with a USB 2.0 port, allowing one to use it as a portable external USB hard drive.