When it comes to computers, flash drives and other gadgets and technology, we typically want the fastest gear we can get our hands on. Today Pretec announced what it claims to be the world’s fastest USB flash drive. The drive has read speed of 40MB/s and write speed of 30MB/s.

The theoretical max speed for USB 2.0 is 60MB/s. The drive is available in 8GB to 128GB making it the fastest and largest capacity drive in the world if you get the 128GB version. Inside the drive is MLC NAND flash storage to keep pricing down.

Acer has announced the Acer Aspire Timeline AS1810TZ notebook which sports an 11.6″ screen with an HD resolution and is LED backlit. This one has a full sized keyboard and delivers up to 8 hours of battery life on a single charge.

This notebook is just one of several announced by Acer, but this model is the thinnest and lightest, weighing just 3.08 pounds. This notebook will launch on October 22 with Windows 7 installed for $599.

The Clothes Pin USB drive is a handy drive to have. You can hang clothes on your clothesline with it and store your data. But you can’t do both. It won’t hold your clothes while in the USB port and it won’t save your data while drying your shirt in the wind.

But USB drives that clip to things are pretty convenient. It can hold your data while holding say, money, important papers…Could be used as a unique tie clip. Just don’t drop this into a pile of your mom’s Clothes pins.

Star Trek merchandising is only surpassed by Star Wars merchandising. Well, here’s the latest Merchandising Trek. The new film is being released on individually numbered 4GB Starfleet insignia USB drives. Yes, I too just heard ten million geeks sigh.

The drive is loaded with DRM, but you can run it on 5 registered devices and burn it to DVD, so that’s not too bad. It will cost you $29. Not sure what that amounts to in Starfleet credits, but it seems like an okay deal.

Iomega has a full line of network attached storage products that it offers. The company has recently added a new version to its line called the StorCenter ix2-200 with dual removable drive bays. The device is aimed at the home office and small office user.

Iomega offers the device in 2TB capacity right now for $369.99. A 4TB version is coming soon at $699.99 and a 1TB edition is available now for $269.99. All versions have the same compact form factor designed to sit on your desk without taking up much space.

We’ve seen a Ninja weapon in USB drive form, so why not an Uzi. Of course the drive is in the clip. Where else are you going to load and reload data from?

This bad boy comes from The Get Busy Committee, a rap group who stuck their upcoming album “Uzi Does It” on uzi-shaped flash drives. Pretty clever marketing. I’ve never heard of them and it has me talking about them. This kind of music marketing gives a new spin to the term “Number one with a bullet”.

So where’s all that USB 3.0 gear at? Well, at least Buffalo has something to offer. The HD-HU3 series of USB 3.0 hard disks will be the “world’s first” to ship. Buffalo will make NEC’s roughly $60 IFC-PCIE2U3 2-port PCI Expressx1 host controller available with its hard drives when they ship this month in Japan.

The 1TB and 1.5TB drives will cost about $225 and about $284. A 2TB disk is on the way later for about $523. Awesome. Now you have something to use those 3.0 cables with.

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.

It took them awhile, but drive makers are finally getting hip to the fact that we would like to see how much disk space is left without having to plug it in. About time. Western Digital’s My Book Elite and My Book Studio drives now feature labels on the outside displaying that always-on info.

That means even when it isn’t plugged in, you’ll get a 12 character label, and a second line that displays how much space is left on the disc. In both gigabytes and a graph no less. Simple solution huh? The USB 2TB My Book Elite is $280, and the 2TB My Book Studio with FireWire 800 and USB connectivity is $300.

It used to be that the wireless router only did one thing and threw in a few wired ports for computers close to the hub. Today the wireless router is becoming a converged device that serves multiple purposes. Netgear has announced a new router called the Rangemax Wireless-N Gigabit Router with USB model number WNR3500L.

The router has gigabit ports on it for fast wired connections and has a single USB port on it. The USB port will allow you to share USB peripherals with the wired and wireless network including hard drives and other devices.

These Hello Kitty Mimobots look absolutely terrifying when there are several together. They travel in packs you see, seeking out your USB port so that they can feed on your files like cute feline vampires in overalls. They are evil and I’m scared. These are in celebration of Hello Kitty’s 35th anniversary.

Sanrio and mimoco got together one stormy night and brainstormed over what kind of creepy thing they could do next. This is their Frankenstein creation. A 2 GB flash drive sells for $25, while the 4 GB version sells for $35 and there’s an 8 GB version that sells for $50.

We’ve been hearing about Rebit and their backup solutions from as far back as October of 2007, and our time to try out one of these devices was far overdue. For this review we got a chance to review a portable backup solution from Rebit which boasts a “ridiculously simple backup” process, and they did not disappoint.

SETUP
Setting up the backup system was about as easy as it could be. We simply unpacked the small, slim portable drive and USB cable and plugged it in to our computer. After a couple of automatically prompted approvals in our Windows Vista system the thing just started doing its job of backing up all the files on the hard drive of our computer. The entire process from opening the box until it started working was under 3 minutes. The drive has a dual-headed USB cord so a separate power supply is not necessary if a single USB port does supply enough power, but in our case a single USB 2.0 connection was all it took to power the device and transfer data.

Asus’ latest Eee Box EB1501 has just been announced and is ready to join the many other Eee Boxes that they always announce. But it’s not just the same-old nettop with similar specifications. They made sure that the EB1501 would stand out from the rest.

For one thing, the EB1501 includes a slot-loading DVD burner. We don’t know if it will be shipped with the drive built-in or if it comes with an external USB disc drive. The EB1501 is powered by a Dual Core Atom 330 processor, an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics card and runs the Windows 7 Home Premium operating system.

Check out this new projector from Epson. Isn’t it dreamio? Epson thinks so, if the name is any indication. The Epson Dreamio EH-DM30 comes with a built-in DVD player and houses 10W x 2ch speakers. It’s capable of throwing 720p images with a maximum 1,280 x 800 resolution.

Some other specs include a 3,000:1 contrast ratio, 2,500 lumens brightness and HDMI. The built-in DVD player can handle JPEG, MP3, WMA and DivX/DivX Ultra file formats as well. You can plug your USB flash drive in directly to enjoy your images big.

QNAP Systems has released the QNAP NMP-1000 networked media player that originally debuted in March at CeBIT 2009. Now it is making it’s way to the masses. The device supports BitTorrent Server, FTP Server, remote web browser access, and is DLNA compliant.

The QNAP NMP-1000 can also function as an external USB or eSATA drive for your PC. The device supports most multimedia file formats including XVID, H.264, H.263, WMV9, VC1, AVI, MPEG/MPG, MKV, FLAC, WAV, WMA, AAC, PCM, AC3, and OGG.