Brinell’s Purestorage line of external HDDs feature and classy exteriors. They’re almost too pretty to carry around and risk scratching that beautiful leather, carbon, wood or stainless steel case. These are probably the sexiest way to carry 160GB to 500GB on your person.

They remind us of old cigarette cases and come equipped with Mini-USB cable connections, a cleaning cloth and backup and synchronizing tool PureSync by Jumping Bytes.

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.

Toshiba has a new range of portable hard drives that feature new system backup functionality and password-protected encryption for greater security. The drives will ship with pre-laoded software that’s compatible with both Mac and Windows. The included NTI BackupNow EZ software lets users backup the whole system and even restore the entire system if Windows fails to boot.

These Toshiba drives will come with password-protected security with up to 256-bit encryption. A Drive Space Alert feature will alert you when it is time to perform some digital cleaning. You can choose from white, blue, green and red.

Seagate just-announced its Barracuda LP series, which cuts down the power consumption without sacrificing very much in performance. According to Seagate, the drives will use up to 50% less electricity than typical hard drives, while giving you a speed of 5,900 RPM and an average latency of 5.5ms, and a 32MB cache.

We don’t have anything on price yet, but apparently they come in 1TB, 1.5TB, and 2TB sizes (all 3.5-inch).

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.

Oh yes. We like shiny. This is one shiny tree. It’s the kind of project that you take on when you find yourself with 70 defunct SCSI hard drives and a whole lotta free time on your hands. If that sounds like you this Christmas season, you can make one too, just like the builder of this tower of joy. It was built by a man with a horse name(trigger).

He took the drives from RAID arrays that were destined for the scrap heap. Instead of performing the DoD wipe that would have otherwise been needed, he built this geek tree from the shiny discs within. The tree is made entirely from the drive pieces, with one exception. A single nut.

Plain boring hard drives. We’ve all got one. But what if you could jazz up that hard drive and actually make a creative statement about your work area? The artists of Brazil’s Meninos design studio hate boring hard drives and they did something about it.

It all started when they made these custom pop art hard drive cases for friends. Now they are releasing them into the wild so everyone can enjoy them. Each external USB hard drive case is made by hand at their studio, using a custom acrylic case covered with a vinyl wrapper that features one of their designs. They’ll also make custom designs for you if you want to upload Adobe Illustrator art using their custom template. I like the Stormtrooper.

BCD has produced a new industrial DVD recorder which can also record to a built-in hard drive. It is called the DVD-1150HDD and you’ll find it pricing at around $2,000.

The BCD DVD-1150HDD is primarily targeted towards more commercial applications. It is designed to be remotely controlled via RS-232, USB or Web-based interactions. Video recorded via this device can be done to either a DVD or standard 250GB hard drive. BCD says the drive is large enough to store around 58 DVDs worth of data.

Western Digital (WD) unveiled today what it is calling the world’s fastest SATA hard drive. It is known as the WD VelociRaptor and you can expect it to cost you around $300 when it hits retail.

The WD VelociRaptor hard drive is a 2.5-inch, 300 GB model which WD says is 35 percent faster then the previous fastest model. Technical features of this upgrade from the WD Raptor include 10,000 RPM, SATA 3 GB/s interface and a 16 MB cache.

The folks over at Buffalo Technology want to put a massive amount of storage in the palm of your hand - 1TB to be specific. The computer equipment manufacturer is accomplishing this task through the release of its LinkStation Mini (LS-WS1.0TGL/R1), priced at around $700.

The Buffalo LinkStation Mini delivers 1TB of storage to you via its dual drive design. It can be configured for either RAID 0 or RAID 1, depending upon your data needs, and sports an auto-sensing Ethernet port so it can act as a network attached storage device. The drives themselves are 5,400 RPM, 2.5-inch notebook drives.

WD launched the new My Passport Essential USB hard drive today with a new glossy look created to go along with the design of the company’s popular My Book hard drives. Like the My Book, the small new Essential drives have that “book” look to them with a bull-nose “binding” on one side.

But, aside from the new glossy digs this drive is still pretty much the same small pocket-sized portable drive that’s powered solely from its USB connection. It comes in sizes of 160GB, 250GB and 320GB with the largest capacity launching with a price tag of a penny under $200. They also come with some software to automatically sync up and store data from your computer along with some Google tools.

If you thought you had a big drive in a small package with Western Digital’s 250GB Passport you can think again. Hopefully you’ve come to expect it these days because soon after you get the biggest and the best something else will come along to out-do it.

WD has announced the launch of the latest in their line of the sleek, portable Passport drives with this one boasting a massive 320GB capacity of storage that is small enough to fit in your shirt pocket. The whole drive and enclosure weigh under a quarter of a pound does not require an external power source. The drive gets its power and transfers data through a single USB 2.0 connection and gives a 480 Mbps transfer speed (which will take you an hour and a half to fill the drive).

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.

Making good use of bricked drives, Etsy has desk clocks created from real computer hard drives that are obsolete. They combined a real working Quartz clock and made a desk clock for the uber-geek. Remove the base and you can even hang it on the wall.

via TechEBlog