Western Digital has announced that they’ve updated their made-for-Mac line of My Passport external drives: the My Passport Studio, and the My Passport for Mac. The most obvious difference for the updates involves the drives’ physical design, with WD wrapped these new drives in an all-metal enclosure instead of the usual shiny plastic. The result? They’re more durable than their predecessors. As a bonus, the new drives look pretty good, with design cues that match Apple’s aluminum-clad Macs.
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.
Western Digital just updated their My Book Studio line for Macs with the Studio Edition II, featuring a compact body that holds in a pair of drives that tops off at a whopping 6 Terabytes. Awesome for the target market, which is basically made up of Mac-using multimedia editors and creative types who need enough space to store uncompressed media files in for editing.
Except for faster transfer speeds (these drives come with USB 3.0 support) and larger capacities, there’s not much innovation going on in the external drive market right now, but Samsung’s new line of portable and external drives look all kinds of awesome. Not that we think a drive’s design should play a major factor into picking one up, but if awesome-looking peripherals (or at least peripherals with a creative touch of color) rock your boat, then remember these kits when they come out in a few months. (more…)
LaCie just put out a new external drive enclosure that makes use of a pair of the latest techs to give you the largest storage capacity you can get with a pair of hard drives. Called the 2big USB 3.0, the device comes with a pair of drive bays that can hold up to 6TBs via two 3TB drives.
