Ah, flash drives. Everyone needs one and everyone has one. But here’s a flash drive that’ll make all your mates’ flash drives look like cheap plastic toys. LaCie just put out the FastKey, which technically isn’t a flash drive. It’s actually a real mobile solid state drive that’s packed into a metal case to make it as portable as any other flash drive. The advantage of doing that is speed and a bigger storage capacity, to the tune of transferring files up to 100 times faster via a USB 3.0 connection that makes it 100 times better than the average flash drive.
Mobile hard drives: everyone who regularly uses a computer needs ‘em, a lot of companies make them, and they’re well worth it if you consider the price per gigabyte you can bring with you. They’re all pretty straightforward storage devices, differing only on interfaces, designs, and capacity, but this really stands out from the rest of the bunch. LaCie worked with designer Philippe Starck again on this one, and the result is a really slick drive that’s wrapped in a brushed aluminum shell.
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.
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.
Ok, it’s actually just the MyBook external drive that they’ve released in the past, but enhanced with a USB 3.0 interface. If you’re looking for serious file transfer performance from an external drive—for animation, graphic design, or plain old large-file-transfers-that-you-can’t-wait-to-get-done—Western Digital’s 2TB MyBook 3.0 offers up to 5Gb/s, or ten times the transfer speed of traditional USB 2.0 drives.
