Gaming notebooks are known for a few things—power, gaming performance and a high price. Your typical gaming notebook will often cost three times or more the amount that you can get a normal notebook for. Not all notebooks for gaming are hugely expensive though and Toshiba has introduced a new gaming machine that has a very reasonable price.

The new Toshiba Qosmio X305-Q701 is a Best Buy exclusive system that retails for $1,549.99. The machine has Toshiba’s slick looking fiery finish with Rouge design. Graphics for the notebook are via NVIDIA GeForce 9700M GTS discrete card and the CPU is an Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 processor.

A niche computer maker by the name of Vology is claiming today the mantle of the world’s fastest gaming laptop. While we have yet to verify that, you can at least learn a little more about the Vology Limited Edition Predator X-2 and its $4,600 price tag.

The Vology Limited Edition Predator X-2, according to Vology, is outfitted with “an Intel Core 2 Quad 2.66GHz, nVidia GeForce 8800M GTX 512MB DDR3, and 4GB of DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz.” It includes as well a full size keyboard with personalized hot keys and a 17-inch monitor.

Dell today formally brought one “beast” of a laptop to the gaming community. The new Dell XPS M1730 has a starting price of around $3,000.

The Dell XPS M1730 is, according to Dell, the world’s first notebook to incorporate AGEIA PhysX Mobile Technology and Logitech’s GamePanel LCD. The PhysX processor reportedly delivers “realistic movement and environmental interaction at incredible speeds without degrading overall performance” and the Logitech LCD lets gamers ” view game stats, create new macros and track important system information without leaving the game.”

Sony has teamed up with New York graphic artist Maya Hayuk to create two visually spectacular limited edition VAIO notebooks. The VAIO Graphic Splash Editions come in two models, “Grow” (pictured above, which suggests plants and other green living things) and “Never Stop” (the space trippy one of the pair). Regardless of which laptop you wind up purchasing the VAIO will come with a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist and desktop wallpaper that matches the laptop’s cover artwork. As well $25 from the sale of each laptop will be donated to a charity called “Creativity Explored”, a nonprofit visual arts center where artists with developmental disabilities create, exhibit, and sell art.

Both models come with a Blu-ray player, 4 GB of RAM, a 200GB HDD, 2GHz Core 2 Duo T7300 chip set, Nvidia GeForce 8400m GT graphics card, and a 15.4″ widescreen LCD. The price for either unit is $2,499.99 and they are available beginning next week from Sony.

Samsung Electronics is marching on with its solid state drives (SSD) today by announcing 64GB models are now shipping. These are reportedly immediately available in Dell and Alienware consumer notebooks.

Samsung said “Alienware will provide a 128GB SSD configuration, by offering dual 64GB SSD drives in a RAID 0 array, as well as a single 64GB SSD combined with a large capacity 200GB 7200RPM drive, available on the powerful Area-51 m9750 gaming notebook. Dell is offering the SSD drive on its premium XPS M1330 ultra-portable notebook, and expects to make it available across additional XPS systems, as well as Latitude corporate notebooks and Dell Precision mobile workstations later this year.”

Today Alienware announced that they will start selling notebooks that utilize Solid State Drives (SSD) to improve performance through the drives faster read and write speeds. The SSD drives will be offered in the Area-51 m9750, Aurora m9700 and Area-51 m5550 notebooks.

In addition to getting your notebook with the fast flashed-based storage, two of the notebooks will also offer dual 64GB SSD drives in a RAID 0 configuration. The company is even offering a dual drive configuration that combines a 32GB SSD drive for faster booting and running applications along with a …

I/OMagic is known for data storage products and has recently expanded its line of external hard drives to include a 250GB model of their 2.5″ portable hard disks. The large capacity, pocket-sized drives are enclosed in a sharp looking aluminum frame and then covered in a black leather carrying case. The GigaBank 2.5 portable drive connects via USB 2.0 (USB 1.1 compatible) and is powered entirely through the USB connection requiring no additional power source. The drives have a transfer rate of up to 480MB per second and run plug-and-play with any …

As hard drives continue to shrink in size and increase in storage space, Toshiba gets to wear the crown for how much you can store on a portable HDD. The company has had its debut in this marketplace by launching 2.5-inch 100GB and 200 GB portable HDDs that are USB 2.0 compatible. That’s about 90 DVD movies you could hold on the largest Toshiba drive, good enough so that you can take it with you on trips for the rest of your life, and its hard shell casing makes it great to stick …

The latest laptop in Toshiba’s Qosmio line has been sighted. The futuristic looking Qosmio G40 is getting a facelift from its predecessors, changing the keyboard base color for a silvery art deco angular finish.

Inside the beast there’s an Intel 2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of RAM, an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 512MB of RAM, HDMI 1.3 output and two 200GB hard drives. A major change is the inclusion of a HD-DVD-R so that you’ll finally be able to burn your own HD-DVDs. The unit’s 17 inch widescreen display has a …

This is the Nexto CF Ultra, an ultra-fast personal storage device to backup memory cards from your digital camera or other portable devices.

The device acts as a backup for your memory cards and thereby frees you up to carry just one or two cards at any given time. Just take the memory card out of your digital camera and insert it into the Nexto CF and press the copy button to backup the card. Once the copy is complete, pull the card out and start taking more pictures.

The ND2525 uses X-Copy …

Not long after Seagate announced its disc level security encryption, Hitachi was right behind them unveiling new 2.5 inch notebook drives for 2007 that have greater capacities, require less power due to flash memory utilization, and have encryption security right on the disk.

The encryption, similar to what is being done with disk level encryption by Seagate, happens right on the disk which allows it to be “bound” with a device and helps avoid having data stolen or lost since it encrypted at the disk level and doesn’t need an application to implement …