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.

These Hardbox external drive cases should come in pretty handy. For one thing, we all know that having books around makes you seem smarter. Plus, if some thieves happen to break into your house, they just might be stupid enough to think it’s a real book. Nobody wants to steal those.

The enclosure supports 3.5 inch SATA I or II drives and connects to your PC via USB. There’s no fan, instead it uses the fake page detailing on the edges as a heat sink, keeping it extremely quiet. The power supply is built-in so the AC cord doesn’t need a large transformer, but that does add to the enclosure’s size. It has a physical write protection switch on the back, and a ‘Backup’ button for manually starting a backup of your data. At $300, you better hope a burglar isn’t into classic literature.

In the keynote speech yesterday at MacWorld Jobs brushed over the MacBook Air SuperDrive fairly quickly giving the message that the need for optical drives are becoming less, especially since the new MacBook Air has no internal optical drive. According to Apple it can download what software it needs through the internet and connect wirelessly to the Time Capsule for backing up and storing data. Apple does know that the end of optical drives is still a ways off and created this MacBook Air SuperDrive as an external optical drive accessory to the MacBook Air, and ONLY for the MacBook Air according to the specs.

It connects and is powered through a single standard USB cable that’s built into the drive so the MacBook Air will power the SuperDrive both when plugged in and when on batteries. The slot-loading SuperDrive is not much bigger than a CD case at 5.47 x 5.47 x 0.67 inches, and weighs 1.09 pounds. It also has some decent speeds with writing CD-Rs at 24x and double-layer DVDs at 4x.

LaCie has put out its share of interesting looking external drives like the Sam Hecht designers and of course that golden number, and they’ve now added to the lineup with this minimalist design from Neil Poulton.

The LaCie Hard Disk, named as simple as it looks, consists of an unobtrusive smooth black box with few distinguishing marks other than the cool blue LED strip (everyone likes cool blue LED strips) on the underbelly and the LaCie brand name on the side. The company says it even runs quietly and cool since it has no fan and uses a “smart” heat dissipation design.

LaCie is thinking big with its latest external hard drive. 2TB big that is. Stomping through the computer lowlands now is the LaCie Big Disk Extreme+. It’s priced at between $350 and $850, depending upon the total storage size you need.

The LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ is available in 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB capacities. It supports the three major interfaces for transferring files from a Mac or Windows machine to its storage, using FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0. It also comes with backup software which can be launched via a one-button press on the body of the drive.

Iomega recently announced the availability of the new eSATA/USB 2.0 320 GB Desktop Hard Drive. This drive is specifically designed for those power users who want to close the gap between internal hard drives and the fastest external hard drives.

The new eSATA interface features three times the transfer rate of USB 2.0. This kind of performance makes this drive a viable option for any application, from video editing to super-fast backups. Iomega’s eSATA drive gets its speed advantage by utilizing the same type of high-speed interface as an internal hard drive.

The drive ships with a eSATA PCI card and cable that can upgrade most PC motherboards to eSATA capability, giving existing computers the same high-speed interface that now appears on new high-end personal computers.

Users can easily add multiple Iomega eSATA drives by stacking or mounting the …