You can count on most notebooks and computers not having a Blu-ray drive today, though the Blu-ray drive is getting to be more common. With USB 3.0 ports now showing up on more computers we are seeing more gadgets specifically for these ports surface as well. Buffalo has announced a new USB 3.0 Blu-ray drive that can write media and play it.

The drive is called the USB 3.0 Blu-ray drive, it can burn BDR discs at up to 12 x speed, and it is capable of writing to CDs and DVDs as well. The drive connects to the USB 3.0 port for best performance, but it is also capable of working with the USB 2.0 port as well.

Seagate has another first on their hands. The company has just announced the industry’s first 1.5TB portable external drive, the FreeAgent GoFlex Ultra-portable. The drive features USB 3.0 connectivity giving you fast data transfers and it is also backwards compatible with USB 2.0 if you’re using the older version.

These drives are formatted for the Windows NTFS file system, but include an optional NTFS driver for Mac, so it works for both systems. The drive will be available in black and will cost you $250 when it’s released.

This new line of Hello Kitty USB drives from Mimoco should please all of the girls out there. Three creatures from Sanrio’s cute Hello Kitty world are featured. Specifically Hello Kitty, Badtz-Maru and Hangyodon.

All three are available in 2GB, 4GB, 8GB and 16GB capacities. The cap is the head of each Mimobot and they are preloaded with a bunch of content specific to each character like wallpapers and avatars. The price? Only $34.95.

MSI has a wide range of notebooks and other computers in its line that include some nice netbooks and AIO desktop offerings. The company has added some interesting new notebooks aver the last month or so to its offerings and among them are the new GX660 and GX660R notebooks.

The two notebooks both have 15.6-inch screens WiFi, Bluetooth, 720p HD webcams, HDMI output, ATI Radeon HD 5870 Broadway XT graphics, and USB 3.0 ports. Some of the other hardware differs between the models. The GX660 has an Intel Core i5-450m CPU, 4GB of RAM, and 500GB of storage.

It’s far from their first flash drives, but Kingston has unveiled their first range of USB 3.0 flash drives. The DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0. These new drives sport the usual design looks and are available in three different capacities: 16GB, 32GB and 64GB.

These drives feature both the USB 3.0/2.0 interfaces and will deliver read and write speeds of up to 80MB/s and 60MB/s, respectively. The 16GB, 32GB and 64GB models are priced at $89, $138 and $270.

If you have important data on your notebook that you take with you so you can work on the go, you should be backing it up. The problem is that some data is so important you need to do more than just save it to an external HDD. This is why folks use RAID arrays in an office setting.

NewerTech has unveiled a new portable RAID storage solution that supports RAID 0 and RAID 1 with dual drives inside. The device is called the Guardian Maximus mini and it sports four different interfaces to allow it to work with Mac and PCs.

There are many reasons why someone might want alerts sent to their desktop rather than only on the phone. For instance, my wife likes crappy music and it drives me crazy to hear it. She also gets 10 million texts per day so when she is wearing her headphones I end up hearing the text alert on her phone all day.

If she was using an Android device and a Mac or Linux computer a new application is available called Android-Notifer that would take those notifications for calls and texts and send them to the computer. The app sends notifications to the PC via Bluetooth or WiFi right now.

When it comes to tech gear it seems like every maker wants to say they have the smallest this or fastest that. The latest new products in the tech realm to lay claim to a world’s smallest title is LaCie with a pair of new USB 3.0 HDDs.

The new drives are the LaCie Rikiki and the Minimus USB 3.0 HDDs. The USB 3.0 connectivity allows the drives to have transfer speeds up to5Gb/s in small form factors. Both of the HDDs are clad in attractive brushed aluminum cases.

A-Data’s newest line of USB flash drives, the C008, was announced back in August. Now they have arrived in European retail stores. These drives come in both 4GB and 8GB capacities.

They are capless flash drives with a matte-textured, scratchproof body and feature a slide-out USB 2.0/1.1 connector. They come in two color options, blue/white and black/red as seen above.

ViewSonic at IFA gave away many of the details surrounding its dual-booting ViewPad tablet. Now dubbed the ViewPad 100, the 10-inch tablet runs on a 1.66GHz Atom and uses either Windows 7 or the now old Android 1.6; either side supports multi-touch. It uses just a 16GB solid-state drive, but an SDHC card slot provides most of the bulk storage.

Many of the other specs are similar to those of a current netbook. It outputs at a native 1024×600 display and holds 1GB of DDR3 memory. There’s Bluetooth, GPS and Wi-Fi, with two USB ports, a 1.3-megapixel webcam and a VGA video output.

Sharp is all set to release a new feature-rich 3D Blu-ray player in November, called the Sharp BD-HP90S. This slim Blu-ray player can play 2D or 3D Blu-ray discs and packs in Wi-Fi to grab BD-Live content from the web without wires. There is also a USB port that allows media playback from external drives.

LED indicators let you know if you are watching movies in 3D, or Aquos “Pure Mode” for enhanced images. The Sharp BD-HP90S 3D Blu-ray player is priced at £379.99 or about $584.

I have a bunch of flash drives lying around my office and they are all fat drives that block USB ports and need to be plugged into a port with a lot of room around it. This is a huge pain, especially if you are on a netbook or notebook with only a few ports.

LaCie has debuted a new flash drive called the MosKeyto that is tiny and looks more like one of those nano receivers for wireless mice and keyboards than a flash drive. The little drive measures 21 x 16 x 10mm and weighs 10g. You can plug the tiny drive into the USB port and just leave it if you want.

I’m sure Sony isn’t too happy about this news. The PSJailbreak claimed to allow users to backup their games to a hard drive recently, and now a hack called PSGroove has surfaced, which claims to be an open source PSjailbreak.

This time the code has to be downloaded and installed on an AT90USBkey or Teensy++ USB development board, then you homebrew sorts will be able to execute unsigned third-party apps and games on the PS3. The ability to boot ISO files is disabled for now, but we are sure that a workaround will be available soon.

Princeton is getting ready to drop a new line of USB flash drives called the Xiao Turn 2. These are pretty colorful with an interesting style and come in capacities from 2GB to 32GB.

These pocket-friendly drives have a rotating cover, a USB 2.0 interface and will play nice with Windows 7, Vista, XP and Mac OS X 10.1.3 or later. The 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB and 32GB models will be available in early September for $16, $21, $36, $69 and $139.

Fujitsu has announced the Lifebook AH530 GFX. It’s a good looking update to Lifebook AH530. This one has an external graphics card with 1GB of dedicated video memory. Aside from that, you’ll find that it shares the exact same specs as the previous model.

That includes a 15.6-inch glossy LCD, optional Core i3, i5, or i7 CPUs, up to 8GB of RAM and up to 500GB HDD, Blu-ray or DVD drives, and an HDMI output. You’ll also get WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1, three USB 2.0 ports, VGA output, and gigabit ethernet onboard.