When it comes to your notebook computer everything is a compromise. The performance of everything from the CPU inside to the hard drives and video cards are a compromise of performance for battery life and vice versa. The trick is to get a good balance of performance while still getting good battery life.

Western Digital announced today that its line of Scorpio Black 2.5-inch SATA notebook HDDs are now available. This line of drives gives high performance with a 7200 RPM rotational speed, but adds some technology to help reduce the battery power needed and increase the runtime of the notebook.

Brando has again upgraded their handy SATA HDD stage rack, this time adding a couple of USB ports and card readers on the front. The computer peripheral, now called the SATA HDD Multi-Function Dock, can connect to your computer through either USB 2.0 or eSATA port and will dock a 2.5″ or 3.5″ SATA hard drive.

The hard drive dock still works with PCs and Macs and continues to provide convenient alternative to cracking open your computer case or using a simple but often messy cable solution. In this model Brando decided to do away with the Firewire they had previously and just stick to the USB and eSATA connections.

Iomega has released a new drive called the Camo eGo hard drive for those that may want to stand out from the crowd at the office but blend in with the forest. The new eGo portable hard drive is powered solely by USB 2.0 and has a very decent capacity of 250GB inside its camouflaged frame.

The drive is also surrounded with a black “Power Grip” to help keep a hand-hold on it, but if you do end up losing your grip you can hope that the DropGuard technology does all that is says for drops up to 5 feet. The eGo Camo Portable drive is compatible with Windows Vista/XP/2000 and Max OS X.

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.

A notebook hard drive sporting 320GB isn’t a new capacity and there are larger notebook drives available right now. However, what is interesting about the new 320GB Fujitsu MHZ2 BJ series notebook drive is that it spins at 7200 RPM.

Typically when a notebook hard drive gets into higher capacities it has to slow down to 5400 RPM or even less for some drives. Not so with the new Fujitsu drive, it gets to spin at full speed. Fujitsu says that the drive has an average latency time of 4.17ms and has a read seek time of 10.5ms and a write seek time of 12ms.

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.

G-Technology, a developer of external hard drives for computers, announced today a new triple rear interface design for its G-DRIVE mini portable hard drives. The new G-DRIVE mini Triple starts at around $180, depending upon the drive’s storage capacity.

The G-DRIVE mini Triple is available in sizes ranging from 120GB to 250GB. It offers for connectivity to a PC or Mac a choice of FireWire 400, FireWire 800 or USB 2.0. The drive is housed in an all aluminum enclosure with built-in heat sink and weighs under nine ounces. It’s bus powered and requires to external power source to operate.

LaCie is taking what we’ll call artistic freedoms with its newest external hard drive solution. Open your wallets and expect to shovel out around $190 for the Golden Disk come late October.

The LaCie Golden Disk is designed by French designer Ora-Ïto and has 500GB of storage. It’s described as being a “sleek, liquid-inspired device” and should definitely spark some conservations as people pass by your cube. It supports USB 2.0, can be used with Windows and Mac and does, in fact, contain a small percentage of real gold.

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.

Kanguru Solutions, a developer of hard drive products, announced today what it is calling the “most environmentally friendly and energy efficient external hard drive on the market.” EcoGeeks get ready - the Kanguru Eco Drive should be coming your way soon.

The Kanguru Eco Drive is a high-speed USB 2.0 hard drive available in capacities of up to 750GB. Kanguru says this hard drive has three power saving modes to gauge hard drive usage and reduce power consumption by up to three quarters. These power modes are configurable through included Windows software.

A report released from Prudential Equity Group recently indicated that Apple may scrap plans for the next generation hard drive based iPod in favor of using NAND flash memory instead. The change according to the report would result in smaller players and improvements in battery life and durability.

NAND flash memory is a very common source of memory for small thumb drives and memory cards, and is a type of non-volatile memory. Non-volatile memory means that it does not need a continuous power source to retain …

Today Hitachi has announced that it will be the industries first in the world to offer a 1 terabyte hard drive. The 1,000 GB drive (for those having trouble with the metric system) will be available to retail consumers in the first quarter of this year, and will come under the name ‘Deskstar 7K1000′ retailing for $399. Hitachi states that the 40 cents per gig (for those having trouble with the math) will make the larger capacity an accessible price for more customers.

This announcement comes within hours of …

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 …