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.

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.

Samsung has announced the world’s fastest MLC-based 256GB SATA solid state drive which boasts some amazingly fast read speeds of 200 mps and 160 mps write speeds. It’s also the thinnest and largest capacity drive with a SATA II interface. Salivating yet?

It measures just 9.5mm thick. No pricing info is available yet, but expect it to be expensive. Should you be able to afford one, they’ll be available this September, with a 1.8-inch version coming in Q4.

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.