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

SavitMicro has a new secure hard drive called the DataMore V2 available for consumers in Korea, although according to Akihabara News you can special order it in the US at GeekStuff4U.com.

The drive is intended to allow you to store your own data securely in a portable, external hard drive. When you first get the drive you can format it and define how much of the drive is “public” and how much of it is “secure”. When connectto a PC via USB, it will show the public portion of the drive that is unsecured at make that available. The secure portion will not be available until you scan your fingerprint on the outside of the drive case, then the secure partition will be available.

When setting up the drive, you can give on or all of your fingerprints to be set …