Hey look, another wireless external drive for iOS devices! We’re not really complaining; in fact, we love these things. Like stuffing peanut butter into chocolate bars, we can’t get over how much of a good idea wireless mobile drives are. Kingston just announced the Wi-Drive, a portable drive with a built-in wireless connection specifically made for adding storage to Apple’s iOS devices. Which makes sense, since just about every other brand offers a microSD card slot.
A mobile hard drive that has a compact, rugged shell and a fast interface? Can’t get any more awesome than that. Well, maybe you can if you replace the mechanical innards with a solid state drive, but an SSD that packs 500GB to 1GB would be so expensive, it won’t even be funny. So here’s a nice solution: LaCie has announced the Rugged Mini, which is basically the mini-fied version of their existing LaCie Rugged, giving you the same levels of protection, the same fast USB 3.0 interface, but in a smaller form factor.
External drives are external drives, right? They’re shiny plastic boxes that you use to store your digital stuff. But while companies strive to make them look pretty (or at least presentable, usually with plain, glossy colored shells), they’re rarely something you’d show off to your buddies. They sit in the background, they store and backup your data, and that’s it. Here’s something that’s clearly designed to be seen: LaCie just tag-teamed up with Porsche Design to come out with a pair of external hard drives that actually looks awesome: the LaCie Porsche Design Mobile Hard Drive P’9220 and the LaCie Porsche Design Desktop Hard Drive P’9230.
First, we saw the Seagate GoFlex Satellite, and now this. It looks like Wi-fi mobile drives are going to be the next big consumer storage trend, for the simple fact that they’re just so damn handy to have around. Like the Seagate Satellite, G-Technology’s G-Connect acts as both a wireless drive that can stream content to an iPhone or iPad and as an access point so you don’t need to look for a hotspot to hook up on the go.
Here’s something everyone might have a need for: Western Digital just introduced the WD Nomad, a rugged case designed to protect your vanilla WD My Passport drives from 7-foot drops and the elements. It’s basically a shell builtwith a “tough polycarbonate exterior” and a”soft elastomer cushion lining” for keeping your data safe when the going gets tough, and is built to MIL-STD 810G military standards for keeping it safe from dirt, dust and moisture.
