Dane-Elec has just announced a new line of So SuperSpeed hard drives and SSDs which use the up and coming USB 3.0 standard. The drives can hit the amazing speed of 250MBps which is about ten times that of USB 2.0.

Capacities range from 500GB to 2TB for the hard drive. The SSDs come in 80GB and 160GB capacities. The So SuperSpeed drives will hit on December 11th, with the 500GB hard drive costing $180 while the SSDs will cost you $400 and $800 for the 80GB and 160GB capacities.

ioSafe, a technology producer of disaster proof storage hardware, launched the ioSafe Solo in January and this week we took the opportunity to test one out to see how well it would hold up. The ioSafe Solo is a rugged external drive designed to keep your stuff safe in the event of a disaster such as a fire, flood or the building literally falling around it.

The ioSafe is not shockproof however and is not designed to be dropped from great distances or thrown around. It is however built to withstand intense heat (up to 1550 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes), complete submersion (up to 10 feet for 3 days!) and is encased in a rugged enclosure making it like the Sherman tank of external drives.

External storage solutions have lots of uses in today’s home. With the huge amounts of digital content the average consumer uses today, we need a place to back that data up. Western Digital has announced a new My Book Studio external hard drive that has an e-label display built-in.

The cool part about the display is that it can show the volume label and how much space is left on the drive even when the drive is not plugged in. The device is designed for Mac users and has FireWire 800 interface and 256-bit hardware encryption.

Samsung has some additions to its S Series of external hard drives. The 3.5″ S3 Station features a 2TB hard drive, while the S2 comes with a 2.5″ 640GB portable hard drive. We don’t have any word on pricing just yet, but we can tell you that the S2 will arrive this month and the S3 Station will be a bit of a wait and arrive on the market early next year.

As far as security, you are covered. Both of these new hard drives will offer similar security features to other S2 Portable and S1 Mini drives including Auto Backup, SecretZone and SafetyKey.

Western Digital now has an upgrade to its 2TB My Book Studio Edition II. They’ve doubled the storage space and it also sports a new exterior design. In its RAID 0 configuration, you’ll find a couple of drive bays available to hold two 2TB hard drives for a total of 4TB of storage space.

It’s compatible with both PC and Mac platforms and the Western Digital 4TB My Book Studio Edition II has a variety of connectivity options including eSATA, FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0. The external capacity gauge will give you important information with just a quick glance.

I am a big fan of netbooks and use a MSI Wind U100 when I am traveling and have never missed my larger and much more bulky Dell laptop. Being a big fan of computers and gadgets, my desk is full of old notebook and desktop hard drives and sticks of RAM. If you have the same sort of hardware lying around, today we are going to check out what could well be the perfect netbook for you. The OCZ Neutrino is billed as a DIY netbook and if you are the type who builds your own PCs, it’s not nearly as DIY as you are used too. The machine lacks storage, RAM and an OS. What it does have comes at a lower price. Is the OCZ Neutrino right for you? Read on to find out.

If you walk into a home or office where a computer is, present odds are you are going to find some sort of external storage solution. More often than not computer users resort to USB external hard drives to back up their data and to store files.

Western Digital has announced that its My Book line of external hard drives is now available with 2TB of storage in a single disk model. That means that big storage takes up less space on or under your desk. The new 2TB disk is available in the My Book Studio, Mac Edition, Home Edition, and Essential Edition models.

When it comes to providing storage for multiple computers on a network in an office or home, the easiest way to do that is with a network storage device. These devices connect directly to a network and offer external storage for any computer on the network.

Iomega has announced a pair of new network storage devices in different capacities called the StorCenter Pro ix4-100. The ix4-100 comes in either 2TB or 4TB capacity and both versions use four internal hard drives that are hot swappable.

The ASUS F50 and F70 range of notebooks sport features tailored specifically for users who want both high definition audio visual entertainment and extensive multitasking capabilities. Users looking for large screen entertainment and massive storage will want the Asus F70SL, the world’s first 17.3″ notebook with 16:9 golden aspect ratio for cinematic viewing and dual hard disk drives providing up to 1 TB in storage space.

The Asus F50 and F70 range of notebooks come standard with high definition audio quality and a 16:9 Full High Definition display for high contrast rate, brightness and color saturation. An HDMI port allows users to connect their notebooks to larger external LCD displays or other HDMI-capable devices.

What’s one to do with all of those used up hard drives lying around? Turn them into swappable storage options, ala flash memory cards? That’s the idea anyhow with the new NewerTech Voyager Q hard drive docking station, being shown off at MacWorld and costing around $100.

Looking something like a stylish, small toaster for a hard drive, the Voyager Q is designed to turn any 2.5- or 3.5-inch SATA I/II drive up to 2TB into a bootable and hot-swappable external drive solution. It works with both Macs and PCs and lets its owner boot and swap drives at will, offering transfer speeds with a connected computer of up to 300MB/s.

One of the products that I see a lot of each year at CES is external storage solutions. The usual companies like Seagate and other places offer a full line of external solutions, but it never ceases to impress me at the number of small firms I have not heard of that offer external storage.

One of the smaller firms, which I have heard of before, called Verbatim has announced a pair of new external hard drives that feature fast 7200 rpm 3.5-inch hard drives inside small enclosures. The drives feature quad interfaces and work with Mac and Windows computers.

We got a chance to get our hands on Griffin’s new Simplifi desktop device recently and we feel they really got the name right on this one. The Simplifi is a small Swiss Army Knife of accessories packed into a smooth silver box that adds some convenience and maybe even a touch of sophistication to your desk.

For starters, the device is a dock and charger for your Apple iPhone and/or iPod. It has the docking port right on top and comes with little plastic adapters to custom …

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.

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.

Other World Computing is out today with an expanded line up of external FireWire-based hard drives it believes are “value done right.” This line of Neptune drives ranges in size from 80GB to 1TB, with pricing ranging from around $85 to $230.

The Nepture hard drives from OWC  feature two six-pin FireWire 400 ports for connectivity to Macs or PCs. Key hardware specifications include a 7200RPM drive mechanism, up to 32MB data buffer and data transfer rates of up to 400Mbps.