Buffalo has released a new external 2.5 HDD It’s available in Ruby Red, Crystal Black, and Pearl White. The Buffalo HD-PEU2-RD 2.5 Inch external hard disk drive comes with a capacity ranging from 250GB to 500GB.

It was specially designed for women with its sleek design and colors, though presumably a man can use it too without being laughed at and branded a sissy. The Buffalo HD-PEU2-RD external HDD is compatible with both PC and Mac. It’s just like all the others, but in a nicer body.

For many iPod owners the only reason to upgrade to a new device is when you start running out of storage space. Rather than delete video or other content form the device, many simply upgrade. The problem is that you may not be able to upgrade to an iPod with more storage if you are already using one of the highest capacity devices.

A company called Rapid Repair is offering an upgrade for the 5G iPod video from the 120GB HDD to a 240GB Toshiba hard drive. The Toshiba drive offers enough space for 300 hours of video or 60,000 songs. That is a lot of content.

There are endless options to choose from when it comes to portable hard drives, but the IDrive Portable is a little different. For one, it’s the “thinnest and lightest portable USB drive in its class,” and the 0.3 pound device will give you 320GB of space on a 5,400RPM HDD. It’s also compatible with Windows / OS X machines.

Like many, there’s a one-click backup option for storing data outside of your PC, but this one also gives you the option to backup online for still more protection. That feature will cost you up to $4.95 per month, but it’s just a question of how much your data is worth to you. he unit itself will cost you $119.95.

Toshiba intros two new Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) for the Japanese market. The Toshiba Vardia RD-G503 has a huge 500GB hard drive, while the RD-E303 has a 300GB hard drive.

Both DVRs support DVD burners, MPEG-2 TS and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC recording, Digital / Analog tuner, DVD upscaling and two remote controls (one fully functional and one with just basic controls). The Toshiba Vardia RD-G503 and RD-E303 will be released next month for $770 and $660.

Brando has a new cool gadget available. This time, they’re offering up a unique laptop cooler with USB Hub and HDD Slot built in. It measures 300mm x 252mm x 32mm and weighs 504grams. The device is equipped with three USB hubs, a 2.5-inch SATA HDD slot, and two fans to keep your laptop nice and cool.

You can plug in any 2.5 inch SATA hard drive to extend your storage when needed and it supports up to 250GB SATA HDD. Brando’s latest USB Notebook Cooling Pad retails for $33 and is a convenient gift to put under the tree this year.

LaCie’s LaCinema Rugged was announced late last month for those across the ocean, which left us Americans wondering if we would ever get to see it here in the US. Sure enough, here it is, in time for the holidays. LaCie has announced US pricing and availability for the bulked up multimedia drive, and you can get one right now starting at $199.99.

Sizes include 250GB, 320GB and 500GB. It’s rugged in name and rubberized build. Great for the media enthusiast who plans to throw their gear around the room and do all kinds of crazy “Will it still work” tests.

When it comes to storing and backing up data on the road a USB hard drive is often the best route to go. The catch is that sensitive data can be easily lost while traveling and if the data you save on the external drive isn’t encrypted anyone who finds it can access your data.

Lenovo has announced a new external hard drive called the ThinkPad USB Portable Secure Hard Drive that is available in 160GB or 320GB capacities. Both of the drives are the same size and are approximately 3″ x 5″ and small enough to fit into a shirt pocket.

Now here’s a claim that you don’t hear everyday. Fujitsu’s new 500 GB, 5400 RPM Hard Drive has a 2.5-inch spinner that can erase the whole of its bad self in under 1 second. It took you longer then that just to read this.

The MJA2 CH uses 256-bit advanced encryption that encodes data on the fly and it’s the first 500 GB HDD with the technology. It also gets points for being a bit more eco-friendly as the MJA2 CH drive only uses 1.4 watts of power while writing data and is considered to have eco-friendly components. The MJA2 CH HDD will surface early next year, at which point it will have permanent amnesia as it gathers data and erases itself to your heart’s content.

The SATA HDD Dock was certainly a hit when first launched and Brando has been capitalizing on it ever since. Last we had heard they added some USB ports and card readers to the dock to give it some additional usefulness and today the SATA HDD Dock has become the SATA HDD Multimedia Dock.

The old Stage Rack still has the ability to dock your drives in a raw sort of way, but can now connect to your TV through S-Video and composite jacks, allowing you to stream out video and pictures from your drive (or a multimedia card or USB drive) without the need of a computer in between. It even comes with it’s own remote control.

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.