Western Digital just cooked a way to spice up the mobile hard drive market by releasing five My Passport Essential drives with limited edition designs. Labeled as Boom Box, Black Hole, Cityscape, Fuschia Leaf and Wave, the patterns were created by design students at the California State University and slapped on top of WD’s shiny vanilla My Passport Essential drives.
Toshiba just released a version of their Canvio portable drives that specifically targets Mac users. Simply named the ‘Canvio for Mac’ (just so there’s no confusion), the new drives come preloaded with NTI Shadow 5 for Mac for doing easy backup and syncs. Aside from that and the Mac-matching colors (they’re available in white or silver shells) they’re still pretty much your standard drive that connects via standard USB 2.0. They’re available now in three capacities: 500GB ($120), 750GB ($140) and 1TB (190).
OCZ Technology packed in two of the most relevant storage-based tech into a slim portable drive called the Enyo. The Enyo features a solid state drive inside the slim aluminum shell, and connects to PCs via a SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface to make for a drive that’s listed to run up to 260MB/s read and 200MB/s write speeds as long as you plug it into a USB 3.0 port.
Seagate’s new GoFlex line isn’t necessarily a direct replacement for Seagate’s popular FreeAgent family of external drives, but they’re certainly an upgrade. Not by way of speed or capacity (at least not specifically), but with their flexibility. Hence the “Flex” in the name. So what’s new? The complete line of drives that make up the GoFlex family feature interchangeable interface cables that’ll let you switch cables to match your ports. So whether you need a drive with a USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FireWire 800 or eSATA connection, or running Windows or Mac (or both), all you need is a GoFlex drive and the right cable adapter.
LaCie just got with the times and updated one of their most popular mobile drives, the Rugged Hard Disk, with a faster USB 3.0 interface. It’s still comes in pretty much the same iconic, designed-by-Neil-Poulton shell that’s protected by orange rubber padding all around, although the new Rugged USB 3.0 model also fits a larger 500GB drive that spins at 7200rpm.
