I'm not sure if that is accurate or not, but with measurements at 4.3 x 2.9 x .5 inches it is even smaller than the popular FreeAgent line from Seagate. The USB 2.0, self-powered drives are available in 250GB, 500GB and 640GB flavors for $75, $109 and $149 respectively.

Today, LaCie introduced the most compact 2.5" hard drive on the market – LaCie Rikiki, in metal. Measuring just a mere 110cm (cubed), its sophisticated form factor holds up to 640GB of media that you won't mind storing in a pocket or purse.

Encased in brushed, sturdy aluminum, the LaCie Rikiki, which means "tiny" in French, represents a resilient aesthetic that protects your media from everyday blunders and unwelcome fingerprints. Its lightweight design makes it a perfect companion for keeping your digital world close at hand.

"We are part of a generation that wants more from our electronics, but in the smallest form factor possible, and with a competitive price," said Anne-Sophie Marchand, Consumer Product Manager. "With the LaCie Rikiki, we have done just that by fitting high-performance and high-capacity in the palm of your hand, for under $100."

Leveraging the versatile USB 2.0 interface, the LaCie Rikiki is instantly compatible with your PC or Mac. Simply plug it in and you're ready to store and share your favorite media with high-speed performance. LaCie Rikiki also offers USB Boost software for enhancing speeds up to 33% (Windows® only).

LaCie Rikiki also comes with a simplified software suite – for quick setup and easy-to-use backup management – enabling complete configuration in just a few clicks. The LaCie Rikiki is an all-in-one solution for storage mobility.

Availability
The LaCie Rikiki will be available in 250GB, 500GB, and 640GB capacities through the LaCie Online Store, LaCie Reseller+, and LaCie Corner, starting at the suggested retail price of $74.99 (excluding VAT). For more information, visit www.lacie.com.

[LaCie]

We don't have details as to exactly how much these drives will cost or when we'll be seeing them in our computers, but we do know that they're shipping to Seagate's OEM and integrator partners at the very beginning of 2010. If the Momentus Thin lives up to all its claims, then its 160GB and 250GB capacities should be a rather attractive option for netbooks. Definitely something to keep an eye on next year.

SEAGATE UNVEILS WORLD'S THINNEST 2.5-INCH HARD DRIVE FOR SLIM LAPTOP COMPUTERS

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. - December 14, 2009 - Seagate Technology (NASDAQ:STX) today announced the Momentus® Thin drive, the world's thinnest 2.5-inch hard disk drive for ultra-portable and entry-level laptops, high-end netbooks, backup devices and consumer electronics. At a wafer-thin 7mm in height – 25 percent slimmer than traditional 9.5mm 2.5-inch laptop hard drives – the Momentus Thin drive gives original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and system integrators significantly lower cost-per-gigabyte storage than solid state and 1.8-inch drives, enabling a new breed of entry-level thin laptops.

Of all netbook computers available today, 90 percent feature 9.5mm 2.5-inch laptop drives because solid state and 1.8-inch hard drives are largely cost-prohibitive for this market. The Momentus Thin drive provides the lowest-cost storage for netbooks and thin laptops, enabling computer makers to offer systems that reach a broader market.

"The Momentus® Thin drive promises to help computer makers differentiate on mobile-computing form factor and better compete in the fast-growing markets for thin laptop PCs and netbooks," said Dave Mosley, executive vice president of Sales, Marketing and Product Line Management at Seagate. "Seagate is committed to helping its OEM and system integrator partners meet market demand for thinner laptop PCs and plans to expand storage capabilities for thin laptops as demand for these slimmer models continues to grow."

The Momentus Thin drive rivals traditional 2.5-inch laptop drives in performance and power-efficiency, enabling thin-chassis designs in all segments of notebook computing and allowing OEMs both to design in greater value on high-end netbooks for easier upselling and to create a wider value differentiation between consumer and commercial laptop PCs. The Momentus Thin drive features two capacity points – 250GB and 160GB – an 8MB cache, a Serial ATA 3Gb/second interface and a 5400RPM spin speed. The drive is scheduled to ship to Seagate's OEM and integrator partners in January 2010.

The Seagate® Momentus® family now helps laptop makers give home and business users a sweeping upgrade path – from netbooks, often purchased as introductory, low-cost laptop PCs strictly for emailing and Internet surfing, to notebooks offering mainstream business and consumer applications, to feature-rich, high-performance laptops, all in standard-size and the increasingly popular thin models. Seagate Momentus 5400RPM and 7200RPM hard drives in the traditional 9.5mm height combine the industry's broadest feature set – including self-encryption, FIPS 140-2 certification and free-fall sensors – with up to 640GB of capacity, fast 3Gb/second Serial ATA interface speeds, cache sizes as large as 16MB, and among the highest hard drive shock-tolerance, acoustics and reliability specifications for entry-level, mainstream and high-performance laptops.

[Seagate]

The main bottleneck in any NAS is the RAID engine. Since many NAS units don't include a dedicated controller, oftentimes the speed of the drive just doesn't matter. If you're using a blazing-fast hardware RAID card in your own custom built setup, then drive speed might make a difference. But for most consumer units, the controller is the bottleneck.

With that in mind, you can go with slower 5400 RPM drives that reduce power consumption, generate less heat, and will likely cost less up front too. Even if you have a dedicated RAID card that could let a 7200 RPM drive do it's thing at full speed, I'd consider the benefits of low-power drives to outweigh the marginal speed increase you might see.

This chart shows the difference between Samsung 7200 and 5400 RPM drives in various RAID configurations:

Not much, right? So think twice before you drop more than necessary on 7200 RPM drives for your backup unit. Check out the link for the full test rundown. [Tom's Hardware]

Doubt it? Everything from the belongs-on-a-battleship looks to the AES encryption software to the 6-18 digit PIN screams "you will not get the 1TB of porn inside me."

Even the touchscreen keypad is paranoid, as it changes randomly each time you use it so the spies you think are on your tail can't memorize the PIN. One touch drive erase means the hentai secrets get scrubbed instantly the moment your parents those spies catch you.

Pricing starts at $488 for the 750GB version and $652 for the 1TB. [Slashgear]

The good news is that these things work well, despite the larger drive and lower power. They're not about performance—5400 rpm only—but when I tested moving a 1GB file to and from, I got it in under 30 seconds, just a hair slower than the same file moved to and from faster FireWire 800 drives. I didn't do any real benchmarking, but I am convinced that the USB is going to be the bottleneck, not the bigger drive (shown below with a 320GB USB-only and a 500GB FW800/USB combo). The FreeAgent was even designed to fit the USB dock and FreeAgent Theater+, though not subtly.

That brings us to the bad news, which many of you already know: Despite being portable bus-powered 2.5" drives, the three-platter HDDs inside these casings are not capable of being ripped out and stuck into your laptop, at least, not without some hackery I am not qualified to endorse. So, in lieu of a full review, I offer this: It works, it's not noticeably sluggish given the added weight, and it feels really good to be able to carry a whole terabyte wherever I want. [Seagate]

The drives will be available this month—although it appears to be a Japan-only release for the moment. The drives will run around $250 and $284 for 1TB and 1.5TB models respectively (a 2TB model is also in the works.), and the controller will run an additional $60. It's probably a bit early to jump on 3.0, but chances are we won't have to wait long before the technology goes mainstream. [Buffalo Japan via Engadget]

The victim today is Super Mario Bros. 3, arguably the best platformer title in history and possibly one of the best video games ever created by mankind.

As of this writing, there is one less of these fine cartridges left in the world. The one you see here has had its guts ripped asunder, only to be replaced with a 160GB USB hard drive.

Sure, one could put thousands of Super Mario Bros. 3 ROMs inside this thing now that it contains a hard drive, but the essence—and a bit of my childhood—are gone forever. I'll be sleeping with my copy under the pillow tonight. [GeekSugar via CrunchGear]

Apparently built by some Polish tinkerer, this clock uses LEDs and the hard disk's natural reflectiveness to create these crazy patterns and colors. It's remote controlled too, in case you need to switch to a different eye-piercing background color. It doesn't seem to be available for purchase, but let's be honest—would you really put display this in your house? If you answered yes, take the lights out of your mouth and go back to Burning Man. [Elektroda via Hacked Gadgets via Boing Boing Gadgets]

The lines are still separated by size, with the My Passports being portable 2.5-inch drives and the My Books taking the larger-capacity 3.5-inch size. My Passport now goes up to a 1TB capacity in a portable, USB-powered drive, and because of a few innovations they're remarkably small. Essentially, WD removed the USB-to-SATA-to-drive connection and made them direct to USB, which saves space—and WD promises there've been no compromises on speed.

Other changes: Security has been bumped up several notches. The security is now hardware-based, rather than merely software-encrypted, so WD actually has to warn users that if they forget their passwords, even WD can't access the drives. They also do incremental backups, so if for example you want to save a couple versions of a document and accidentally overwrite one of them, these drives will have saved all versions of your progress.

My favorite has to be that teeny 1TB 2.5" My Passport Essential SE. The triple platter drives (plus the direct-to-USB connection) make it much smaller than I expected. It'll cost $250 when it's released later this month (the 750GB version will cost $180). Others:

• My Passport Essential: 320/500/640GB ranging from $100 to $150, released this month with equivalent Mac version
• My Book Essential: 0.5/1/1.5/2TB from $99 to $250, with lighted capacity gauge and equivalent Mac version

We'll let you know when we have precise release dates, but you can expect all of these drives to be showing up in stores very soon. [WD]

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000, is a 3.5-inch drive that fits inside any compatible computer or enclosure. As expected, the drive uses the SATA interface and is Energy Star-rated. Hitachi didn't reveal pricing, but said they were shipping the drive immediately. So be on the lookout. [Dvice]

What's different? Intel is now using 16GB flash packages instead of 8GB packages, the DRAM size went up (yet clock speed went down?), and the black goo used over the prior generation's controller has been cleaned up.

All these changes boil down to no improvement on sequential read performance, a 7% improvement in sequential write performance, a 10% improvement in random read performance, and a whopping 40% increase in speed in random write performance.

Conclusion? The X25-M G2 seems like it lives up to Intel's bragging as it's about 0-40% faster than the last generation drive based on AnandTech's testing. This translates to an improvement of 0-10% in the real world. We were hoping for awesome improvement, but we're happy to have at least gotten some improvement. [AnandTech]

However, the XF1 looks geared towards the mainstream consumer crowd, as it only plays back video at 1080i, and fails to support the h.264 or MKV standards. It does, however, support the AVI, Xvid and MPEG family of codecs, along with all the major audio ones. Price and availability are yet to be announced. [LG via Everything USB]

Register Hardwaresays that The Hard Rectangular Drive (HRD), developed by DataSlide, is roughly 4x faster than current HDDs, and uses the same process to manufacture CPUs for the data heads. Piezoelectric actuators are used to scan the data heads and access specific parts of the magnetically-encoded platter. At any one time, 64 data heads are able to simultaneously transfer data. It also only uses 4W of power, which makes it half as power thirsty as a SSD.

The current technology consists of a single platter in a 3.5-inch drive, though it will be possible to stack platters in the future. [Register Hardwarevia Fast Company]

Adding to the composite, component, and USB, the SATA HDD Multimedia Dock II also has an HDMI port, although it only supports 1080i. The media player supports the following formats:

• MPEG-1 (MPG, DAT)
• MPEG-2 (MPG, MPEG, VOB)
• MPEG-4 (AVI, MP4)
• DivX 3.11/4/5 (AVI, DIVX)
• XviD (AVI)
• AVI decode audio: MP3, AC3, ADPCM
• VOBSUB: srt, sub, smi, txt, ass, ssa
• MPEG-1 Layer 3, 24-320kbps (MP3)
• AC3 (in the movie)
• Microsoft PCM Wave (WAV)
• Advance Audio Coding LC (AAC)
• Microsoft Windows Media Audio WMA7/8 (WMA), no support for WMA9 Pro
• MP2 (MPA)

Looks like crap, but nice for $79. [Brando]

Just by looking at the 13 and 15-inch models together, you can tell that Apple was pretty much right when they said that they belong in the same family. The construction is almost identical. The only difference is that the 13-inch has one fewer audio jack and no side-board speakers, as been the case for the 13 for years now.

In other words, any 2.5 or 3.5-inch hard drive can push HD video (MPEG, AVI, MP4, VOB, and DiVX) through the adapter. It also handles content from HD cards and USB drives and comes with a remote control for added convenience. All-in-all, not a bad set of features for $69. [Brando]

The device attempts to solve a problem that doesn't exist—cooling netbooks that generally run pretty cool—while simultaneously destroying a netbook's main purpose on this earth, portability. Because the USB Mini Netbook Cooling Pad + 3-Port Hub + 2.5" HDD Dock is almost as big as the netbook itself. Almost. In this case, the USB Mini Netbook Cooling Pad + 3-Port Hub + 2.5" HDD Dock is just small enough to make the resting state of your computer into a dangerous challenge of physics.

And then it's painted pink to top it all off, a color that matches everything.