As a user who’s had to go through a number of failed drives and lost photos, music and videos over the past couple of years (seriously Seagate, you just lost a customer) I’ve personally been waiting for something like this. Specifically, a drive that promises to preserve your most precious data for 100 years… or at least as long as you live. Or as long as you’re still aware that you have some important data lying around from a few decades ago. Anyway, that’s exactly what SanDisk is promising with this fancy silver brick they just unveiled. Called the SanDisk Memory Vault, this drive was designed to keep your data safe for up to a century.
Toshiba has announced that they’ll be coming out with the FlashAir, an 8GB SDHC card that they labeled as “the world’s first SDHC memory card with embedded wireless LAN functionality to meet the SD Memory Card Standard.” It’s pretty similar to the Eye-Fi Pro X2 (which is already available for $100), but unlike the Eye-Fi card that supports only one-way transfers, this one comes with an extra function that will let you receive files from other devices and not just send. It’s basically an 8GB SDHC card that’ll allow you to wirelessly transfer photos to and from other network-connected devices, letting you upload shots directly from your digicam straight to your computer or smartphone, or other FlashAir-compliant digicams.
Toshiba didn’t give any pricing yet, but the FlashAir 8GB card is set for a release in February 2012. Press release after the break.
Unless you go SSD, you don’t usually buy a mobile hard drive for performance – you buy them for the compact form factor and, well, the storage. But what if you want some performance to go with that portable form factor and sub-1 Terabyte combo? Well, here’s your answer: Seagate just announced the GoFlex Turbo, a mobile hard drive built for better-than-usual speed, thanks to a USB 3.0 port and a 2.5-inch 7,299rpm drive.
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.
