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Samsung has announced their new EcoGreen F1 hard drive touting a full one terabyte of storage capacity and environment friendly features. This eco-friendly hard drive can be used as either an external or internal hard drive for desktop PCs and thanks to the large capacity it would be well utilized for surveillance applications as well as for audio and video recording.

The EcoGreen F1 hard drive sets itself apart from other low-powered one terabyte hard drives by its 15% power savings when in use, and 50% power reduction as compared to the power utilized by other traditional hard drives. Additionally, the F1 hard drive utilizes a lower number of moving parts to make it run, thereby also boosting it’s speed when in use. It comes equipped with SilentSeek and NoiseGuard, both of which help achieve a quieter operation. It also has a reinforced flying on demand (FOD) technology that controls the distance between the disk and the head which ensures data stability.

As for its technical specifications, the Samsung F1 EcoGreen hard drive runs at 5,400rpm, has a 3.0Gbps SATA interface, native command queing features and a 32MB buffer memory. The EcoGreen F1 will be available on the second quarter of 2008 for $199.

Read [Business Wire]

Seagate has announced that Dell XPS laptops will soon be shipping with their Momentus 7200.3 hard drives, and they will also incorporate the same technology on Alienware laptops soon. The Momentus 7200.3 hard drive was designed for on-the-go worker and touts a low power consumption and overall reliable performance. This new Seagate 2.5-inch hard drive gives out up to 320GB of storage capacity and boasts a fast Serial ATA 3.0 Gbit/second interface. It spins at a 7200-rpm speed and has a 16MB cache. In addition the hard drive is equipped with G-Force Protection that was built to withstand up to 1000Gs of non-operating shock and 350Gs of operating shock and free-fall sensor technology that helps to prevent drive damage and data loss even when your notebook gets dropped.

The Momentus 7200.3 will be offered in 80GB, 120GB, 160GB, 250GB and 320GB storage capacities. These new Seagate hard drives also consumes less energy and will only be a $46 upgrade on the XPS M1730 notebook.

Read [CNW Group] Via [Engadget]

Western Digital has just unleashed their My DVR Expander external hard drive.  This WD drive is certified to work as an external storage device for Dish Network DVRs.

The hard drive line sports 500GB of storage, which in TV terms, is 300 hours of standard definition content and 60 hours of high definition content.  The drive will definitely work with the Dish set top boxes.  However, on top of the device’s $149.99 price, you will have to pay a fee to activate the USB port on your set top box.

Western Digital is hoping to expand the compatibility of such external drivers to other TV providers.

Via [CrunchGear]

Standing by their tag line, Fujitsu will truly “make your data portable” with its new Handy Drive 400, offering 400GB of space for any kind of digital contraption you can throw at it. The drive measures a convenient 3.23 x 5.57 x 0.87-inches and weighs 8.12-ounces. This 4200rpm hard drive will connect to your PC just fine over USB 2.0, although there’s no word whether this will support Firewire. Available now in Japan for 216€ or just a little over $330 USD. Yes, it’s pricey.

Via [Akihabara News]

For those looking to give their external hard drive a little camouflage within their home office, the Hardbox may be just what you need. We do mean it though when we say little, because while the drive itself has the appearance of a book, it still has two external LED lights. Though we cannot say for sure, it seems those LED’s would most likely draw some attention in the midst of those regular books on your shelf.

The drive is being offered up from Sarotech and has support for 3.5-inch SATA I or II hard drives with support for up to 1GB. The Hardbox comes with a built-in power supply and ships with “powerful backup software.” It offers up a USB connection, but seems to be missing one important item, a fan. However according to Sarotech the drive has an “advanced aluminum” case that keeps the drive operating at a cool temperature. Sadly the Hardbox is currently just available in the Korean market and is also a little on the expensive side at 315,000 KRW, around $300 US.

Product [Sarotech] Via [Oh Gizmo!]

The GBDisk RS1 series of Serial ATA (SATA)-compatible industrial silicon disks is the latest addition to TDK’s roster, which will be made available in June with up to 16GB capacities. High-speed, frequent data writing and maintaining data reliability come first with the GBDisk RS1 series. And because of that, it features single level cell (SLC) NAND Flash memory, and GBDriver RS1 SATA controllers for use in NAND Flash memory controller ICs.

It also offers complete power interruption tolerance, error correction, distributed data writing, and bad block management. Basically, these are new types of hard disks, coming in at the same size as current generation HDD’s (2.5-inches) that should offer fast start up, stringent shock resistance, and low power consumption. It’s been reported to be already Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL)-certified, and now if only they could bump up the storage a bit more than 16GB’s, then we’d all be happy. Or at least, those who need to use hard disks in industrial equipment.

As of now, pricing is unknown, but as earlier mentioned, production will start in June 2008.

Via [Tech On]

Remember that innovative Wi-Fi-enabled SD card aptly named the Eye-Fi? Well Eye-Fi, which is what the company is also called, must have been overwhelmed by the success of their product that they decided to add not just one new model, but three to the Eye-Fi SD card series. So, we now have the Eye-Fi Share, Eye-Fi Home and the Eye-Fi Explore.

Actually, there’s not too many differences with these three models. It is still the same Wi-Fi enabled SD card that was launched not so long ago. For instance, both the Eye-Fi Share and Eye-Fi Home are almost identical to the current Eye-Fi models in terms of features. However, Eye-Fi home is geared for users who want to sync their SD card to their PCs only. While the Eye-Fi share lets users to automatically sync their SD card to both their PCs and websites, such as Flickr.

On the other hand, the Eye-Fi Explore is more of a tie-up with Wayport, a major hotspot provider in the US. So, the Eye-Fi Share lets users to automatically upload their photos while connected anywhere there is a Wayport hotspot without the need to authenticate for each location. In addition, the Eye-Fi Share also allows geotagging and supports Skyhook’s Wi-Fi triangulation for GPS purposes.

The Eye-Fi Explore, Eye-Fi Share and the Eye-Fi Home are now available for $129, $99, and $79 respectively.

Via [Ubergizmo] Via [Gizmodo]

Sony has made available a slew of tiny USB flash drives in its Microvault product line, branding these babies as the USM-L. The drives measure in at 0.69 x 0.33 x 2.44-inches and weighing only around 0.32-ounces, who would think that the USM-L flash drives can store as much as 16GB of data? Well, that’s how flash drives are nowadays, the smaller they get, the larger their storage capacities are, and this is particularly true with the Sony USM-L flash drives.

As if the USM-L flash drives were not small enough, Sony even made use of the Click mechanism which makes it shorter when it is connected to your machines. This also enables Sony to do away with the common USB flash drive design that comes with a cap that you have to pull out to reveal the flash drive’s USB connector. With the USM-L, all you have to do is to slide out the flash drive’s body to reveal the USB connector. 

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It’s very seldom that we hear about Sony coming out with a flash drive product, although we know that it certainly has some data storage devices in its arsenal but these mostly belong to its proprietary Sony Memory stick duo series which are used for most Sony Ericsson mobile phone’s and the PSP. So, it is refreshing to hear about this new USB flash drive which belongs to Sony’s Microvault product line. The flash drive we’re talking about is the USM-LX high-speed USB flash drive.

The USM-LX gives a maximum read-out speed of 31Mb/s which is the USB flash drive standard, is simply fast enough to handle large files - that is store, transfer and share just about anything. Sony has also made some stride in improving this flash drive’s design by using what it calls a “Click mechanism”. This eliminates the need for a USB cap, since all you have to do to connect the USB to your machine is to slide out the flash drive’s body to reveal the USB connector. This adds some convenience to users as it makes the flash drive shorter when not in use.

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A woman is suing Best Buy for $50,000 after a Geek Squad employee admitted viewing, and later stealing the nude photos she had on her PC. He copied them to his flash drive, shared them with his fellow employees and put them on the hard drives of other customers. While employee, William E. Giffels fully admitted to viewing and copying the photos to his flash drive, he claimed they ended up on other computers computers solely by accident when he forgot to delete them from the drive before allowing other employees to use it to access the diagnostic tools he also had stored on it. 

There hasn’t been any comment from Best Buy yet, but one can assume Mr. Giffels will be seeking new employment soon. While he is clearly in the wrong for what he did, you have to wonder why anyone would hand over a computer for repair without removing such sensitive and private content? When you think about it it could have been much worse. What if he had copied her banking or credit card info instead? I think the lesson here is if you have to take your PC in for repair, make sure there’s nothing on it you wouldn’t want the whole world to see!

Read [The Consumerist]