By David Ponce

I wish there really was much more to say than what’s in the title… but really there isn’t. This is what passes as art these days. You know what they say: all the talented artists are busy making money for one commercial interest or another (games, ads, etc.). What’s left are people with crappy ideas, too much money and stickers that say “Art”, begging to be put on whatever they think makes a statement. This particular exhibit is a 1TB hard drive that is on display at the Art 404 gallery, on a pedestal, with an accompanying PDF listing everything that’s in it. Books, “124GB of copyrighted music, fonts, Adobe software, various game system ROMs, and more.”

I’m not going to bother to point out that the value of what’s in most people’s hard drives probably exceeds that amount, but… well… you get my point.

[ "Product" page ] VIA [ Geekologie ]

By Chris Scott Barr

Here’s an interesting thing. TVs are getting more and more features these days. Enough that they can actually start eliminating the need for other devices to be connected to them. The next device to go? If Sony has anything to say about it, they’re looking to replace your DVR.

Sony is releasing a trio of new Bravia TVs that come equiped with 500GB hard drives. What’s more is that they have support for external drives, just in case you run out of room. The only real difference between the three models is size, which range from 22-inches to 40-inches. The new sets will cost you a pretty penny though, with the smallest size fetching $1,000 when it launches next month in Japan.

[ Sony ] VIA [ Geeky Gadgets ]

By Ian Chiu

[ The following article is syndicated with permission from Everything USB ]

USB 3.0 is here. While not everyone has immediately hopped on the bandwagon yet, several major motherboard and storage manufacturers have been actively pushing out SuperSpeed USB devices, and one of them is Seagate BlackArmor PS 110 Performance Kit. Bearing an ambitious name, the BlackArmor PS 110 is one of the industry’s first portable USB 3.0 2.5″ drives. The kit – backed by a generous 5-year warranty – comprises of a 7,200-rpm 500GB drive that now becomes the performance bottleneck instead of the USB interface; a single-port USB 3.0 ExpressCard/34 card; an auxiliary power cable; and a backup software suite.

Obviously, what makes this drive so special is the speed. The on-board USB 3.0-to-SATA bridge chip boosts average performance to consistently high between 60 to 95MB/s. This is up from 30MB/s range registered by USB 2.0 FreeAgent Go. A review by Everything USB confirmed that the BlackArmor PS 110 USB 3.0 is indeed the bottleneck as a 3.5″ 1TB drive inside a WD My Book 3.0 easily bumped speed even further to 110MB/s. Keep in mind BlackArmor PS 110 3.0 is only first generation product. So it could take a year or two before the potential of USB 3.0 is fully realized. Read on for the full review for all the benchmark data and usability test results.

[ Seagate BlackArmor PS 110 USB 3.0 Review @ Everything USB ]

By Evan Ackerman

Earlier this month, we posted a review of Cloud Engines’ Pogoplug, a piece of hardware that takes USB hard drives and makes them network accessible (among other things). Iomega has come out with another option for centralizing your storage, called the iConnect. Like the Pogoplug, the iConnect lets you plug in standard USB drives, and then puts them on your home network. Plus, it throws a whole bunch of other cool stuff into the mix, like wireless access and printer networking. Read the review, after the jump.

The setup is really, really easy: plug a USB drive into one of the 4 ports on the iConnect, plug the iConnect into your router (even if you’re going to run it wirelessly, you still have to start this way), and power it on. Next, insert the install CD.

Oh. My optical driveless netbook does not approve of that. A quick trip to the iConnect support site got me what I needed, though. The automatic installer does its thing quickly and quietly, which usually means that it’s not doing anything super invasive. Starting the Storage Manager software starts a program running in the background which finds the iConnect on your network and maps the drive(s) you’ve attached to it to a network drive which you can access right away. Simple.

It turns out that once you’ve got it up and running, any computer attached to your network can access the iConnect’s HDs as a standard network drive also, no install necessary (at least on my Windows XP computers). This is as easy as it could possibly be, which is the way things are supposed to work.

The iConnect manager is browser based, which is nice, since it minimizes the weight of the program you have to have running. There are a lot of configuration options that you can set, including handy things like setting up multiple user accounts with vary levels of permissions, email notifications, and changing the intensity of the LED on the front of the iConnect.

The wireless setup was not difficult, but I wouldn’t call it simple, just because the interface is a little bit clunky and the wireless setup is buried a few screens down. At least, the process seemed not difficult, since the software told me that it had connected to my network with a strong signal, but unplugging the iConnect and restarting both it and the software didn’t get the device to show up wirelessly. After some lazy troubleshooting that mostly involved turning stuff off and on again, I realized that I was attempting to connect through my isolated guest network, which of course was not going to work. My bad; connecting the iConnect to my primary network worked like a charm.

I bring up this admission of my own technical idiocy as a warning, of sorts… Messing with wireless networks is tricky, especially when you’re trying to do anything but the most basic of tasks. We obviously shouldn’t expect all pieces of hardware to be plug ‘n play, but at the same time, when a company knows that some particular piece of the setup process is likely to be (or has the potential to be) especially complicated I feel like the least they can do is have a help page somewhere that says “Wireless connection not working? Here are some obvious things to keep in mind!”

I have to say, though, despite the potential hassles the wireless connectivity is a pretty sweet feature. For some of you, it may not matter at all, if you’d be sticking the iConnect and your drives next to your router anyway. But beyond convenience, it gives you the option of (say) hiding the whole setup in your closet (or garage) if you’re worried about security.

‘Course, you might not want to do that, since you can also hook a printer up to the iConnect to easily network it. There are a bunch of other things you can do too, like setting up one-touch drive backups (it works as a Time Machine server, too) or automatic picture transfers, and the iConnect even talks to your Xbox and PS3 (and iTunes), allowing you to stream media. There are a lot of options and a lot of features, software-side. Maybe more than you’ll use, but there’s certainly nothing lacking when it comes to functionality.

So, with the wireless network storage working, the next step is remote access. This requires enabling security on the iConnect, which by default, is not enabled, allowing anyone access to the iConnect’s networked drives. After you set up an admin username and password and go back to the remote access setup, you get this message:

Before enabling Remote Access, it is highly recommended that you change your Iomega iConnect network settings to manually configure the IP address.

Now, I’m a reasonably experienced computer user. I know what an IP address is and stuff. But this kind of thing scares me. I was hoping that the iConnect would somehow take care of all the dirty work, but instead it has me log in again, takes me to the network settings page, and leaves me there, helpless. Trying again, I tell the iConnect to forget about manual IP address config, and… Uh oh. I have to select a “remote access subscription service level.” Huh. Turns out that you’ll be paying $10 per year (after the first free year) for remote access, or $25 per year if you want to use your own domain name.

If you use their domain name, you have to pick a prefix that’s not already in use. “iConnect” is already taken, and I just picked up “ZipDrive,” so good luck with that. After confirming numerous Firefox security exceptions and restarting the software, I tried going to “http://zipdrive.iomegalink.com/” and arrived at my router login screen. Um, oops. After some messing around, I was able to figure out what the internal network IP address of the iConnect was and just went there manually, so to speak. This is what the file browser looks like:

You can upload, download, delete stuff, and view a few different types of files like pictures. Nothing fancy, but it works. Browsing around a bit more, though, I ran across this message on the remote access config screen:

IP Changed. However, your router could not be automatically configured. To connect to your device remotely you will need to configure your router manually.

This is just the sort of message that I dread, because Iomega is basically cutting me adrift in a sea of network configuration. I mean, what am I supposed to do now? I’m sure it involves something about port forwarding through my router or cable modem or both, but beyond that involvement, I have no clue.

Unfortunately, the support site that Iomega currently offers doesn’t seem quite ready to handle the potential pitfalls offered by the iConnect’s diverse networking options. Like, a bunch of the answers in the FAQ refer to a different product, and searching for “remote” (as in “remote access”) doesn’t provide much in the way of help.

Still, despite the potential remote access issues, the iConnect is a solid performer when it comes to local networking. Setup is easy, and you’ll be sharing USB drives across your network in just a few minutes. The wireless connectivity is a great feature, as is the ability to add a printer. The iConnect isn’t just a smart replacement for a very expensive and generally more trouble than it’s worth NAS system, but a feature-packed peripheral that gives you an impressive variety of data access options.

You can find the iConnect for $99 on Amazon (pre-order), and slightly cheaper elsewhere.

[ Iomega iConnect ]

By Evan Ackerman

Less than $100 probably means $99.99, but that doesn’t change the fact that the 2.5″ Onyx SSD from OCZ is actually in the realm of casually affordable, a first for SSDs. We’re used to seeing SSD drives that offer incredible performance, but at a price point that makes most of us just sigh sadly. The OCZ Onyx, while offering only modest speeds (125 MB/s read and 70 MB/s write) relative to other SSDs, is still fast enough that you’d notice a significant difference in load times if you stick your operating system on it. Unsurprisingly, the drive only has a capacity of 32 gigs, so your operating system may be the only thing you can stick on it, but that’s okay.

Even if the speed and size aren’t that impressive, don’t forget about the other benefits of SSDs: they’re light, shockproof, durable, and use up a heck of a lot less power than conventional drives since they don’t have anything inside them that needs to be kept spinning at several thousand RPM all the time.

$100 is not going to get you some kind of incredibly awesome SSD drive. But it will get you this SSD drive, which, for the cost, is way better than no SSD drive at all.

[ Press Release ] VIA [ HotHardware ]

By Chris Scott Barr

When Microsoft entered the console gaming market, it was a great day for gamers here in the US. Now I don’t have anything against Nintendo or Sony, I love their consoles. What I don’t love is all of the exclusive hardware that Japan gets from these companies, since they are located in the region. Well since Microsoft is located here in the US of A, the tables are turned. Take this new 250GB hard drive that has been announced for the 360. Guess where it’s being launched first. Wait, Japan?

What’s even more strange is that despite a confirmed March 11 launch in Japan, there is no plan for a US release. Does Microsoft not think that we download enough? Or maybe they know that we’re in a recession, and aren’t going to pay $170 for a 250GB hard drive. I’ve ranted about this before and it still infuriating, you can buy a 2.5-inch hard drive (which is what’s used for the 360) for 1/3 of the price they are selling it. That’s one heck of a markup. They should take a cue from Sony and let us use our own drives to upgrade.

[ Microsoft ] VIA [ PCWorld ]

By Chris Scott Barr

Do you have need of a lot of external storage and want to make use of that USB 3.0 card that you decided to purchase? After all, what good is having the ports if you don’t also have devices that use them? LaCie has announced their latest external drive, dubbed the 2Big RAID drive which utilizes the latest in USB technology.

Obviously speed is the name of the game with this drive, with throughput speeds of 275MB/s. These speeds are reached by using a dual-disk RAID configuration along with the USB 3.0 technology. LaCie claims that with a drive this fast, you can stream and edit multiple HD files simultaneously. Pricing and availability have not yet been announced, though you can expect to pay a nice premium for the extra speed.

[ LaCie ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]

By David Ponce

We’ve written about Philippe Stark a few times before. He’s an influential French industrial designer who’s gotten involved in the design of an endless stream of consumer products from juicers, to teddy bears and now hard drives. Partnering up with LaCie, he’s helped develop these drives with an interesting design. The desktop drives have a customizable touch-sensitive surface allowing you to launch preselected applications based on how you touch them. They comes in 1TB or 2TB sizes ($129 or $249) , and also feature the Starck Signature LED (a “+” sign, since the man likes to spell his name S+arck) which glows green or orange based on activity. There are also portable versions of these drives in sizes 320-500GB, with prices starting at $99.

[ Desktop Drive Product Page ] AND [ Portable Drive Product Page ] AND [ Interview With Starck ] VIA [ Uncrate ]