I bet it won’t be too long before all external hard drive enclosures come with a commodity MPEG-4 decoder chip and video out hardware built right in. SigmaTek is selling this X-Bay “Multi-media Hard Drive” for $euro;330 with a 40GB hard drive—not much of a deal, really. But they also sell it without the hard drive for just €200;—that’s not much of a deal, either, I grant you, but the ability to plop in whatever size drive I can get for cheap (and €130; can buy a lot more storage than 40GB, for sure, even in 2.5-inch hard drives) makes it a lot more attractive. While empty USB 2.0 and FireWire enclosures are about a third to a quarter of the price of this thing right now, it’s not like MP3 and DivX decoding is a moving target. By this time next year I wouldn’t be surprised to see enclosures like this for less than €100.
For our American readers, one Euro is equivalent to about 30 pounds of Idaho Russet Potatoes or 17 deprecated file extensions. (Thanks, Jive!)
Multi-media Hard Drive X-Bay [SigmaTekComputer]
