Oh! Gizmo

By Andrew Liszewski

Over the next few weeks if you happen to be having a conversation at the water cooler and the question of who makes the smallest 32GB USB flash drive comes up, you can confidently drop Super Talent’s name. Today the company announced six new models of their Pico drives that each feature 32GB of NAND flash storage as well as transfer speeds up to 200X, or 30MB/sec. Three of the new models are water resistant and feature gold or nickel finishes ($85) while the other three include AES-256 hardware encryption for extra security ($99).

[ PR - Super Talent Unveils World’s Smallest 32GB USB Drive ] VIA [ I4U News ]

By Andrew Liszewski

This morning Corsair launched a new ‘extreme’ series of solid-state drives that use the Indilinx Barefoot controller, Samsung MLC NAND flash memory and 64MB of on-board cache to achieve read speeds of up to 240MB/sec and and write speeds of up to 170MB/sec. The drives will come in 3 capacities including 32GB, 64GB and 128GB and should be available worldwide immediately. While they’re obviously not the biggest SSDs on the market, if speed is your priority I’m sure these will work quite nicely.

[ Corsair SSDs ]

By Andrew Liszewski

On Monday Hitachi Global Storage Technologies announced a bunch of new storage devices and accessories like the SimpleNet box Evan brought you yesterday, and these slick looking SimpleTOUGH portable drives. But they’re not only about looks. The drive is billed as “one of the world’s most rugged drives for protecting data in harsh environments” and it’s not only water-resistant, but it can also survive a drop of almost 10 feet. I particularly like the integrated foldaway USB cable which means you never end up in the situation where you desperately need a file off the drive, but have neglected to pack the appropriate cabling.

The SimpleTOUGH drives will be available in 3 sizes, 250GB for $99.99, 320GB for $119.99 and 500GB for $149.99.

[ Hitachi SimpleTOUGH ] VIA [ DVICE ]

By Evan Ackerman

A NAS (network attached storage) drive is quite a handy thing to have on your home network. You can stuff it back behind your router (assuming it’s not a part of your router, that is) and forget about it, except that it’ll always be available to any computer on your network… It’s an easy way to add flexible storage for things like media that multiple people want to share. Or, it should be an easy way, but it often turns out to be expensive and troublesome.

This little box from Hitachi is called SimpleNet, and it’s able to turn any external USB drive into a NAS drive. From the look of things, you plug your router into one and a USB drive into the other, and that’s it. $80 might be a tad steep for this convenience, but there’s a lot of possibilities with this little device, and it gives you the flexibility to hot swap as many USB drives as you like. I haven’t run the numbers on this, but my guess is that you’ll probably save money (and headaches) if you get SimpleNet and some regular dirt cheap external USB drives, as opposed to a couple external drives designed with integrated ethernet ports. Yes, you’re going to take a speed hit with the 10/100 ethernet port (plus the USB) on the SimpleNet, but I bet it’ll work great for backups and light media access.

The Hitachi SimpleNet USB NAS adapter should be available now(ish) in retail stores.

[ Press Release ] VIA [ Ubergizmo ]

By Andrew Liszewski

A lot of high-end DSLRs still use compact flash cards instead of the ever-more-popular SD and its smaller cohorts. (The Nikon D3 comes to mind.) But that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to buy a CF card which are getting harder and harder to find these days. These handy adapters from PhotoFast allow to use standard SD and microSD cards in your camera via a CF type II compliant adapter. And I particularly like the model in the lower right-corner which actually comes with a built-in RAID controller allowing you to use up to 4 microSD cards at the same time, theoretically giving you about 64GB of storage with 4 x 16GB microSDHC cards.

All 3 of these adapters appear to be available from the PhotoFast website and range in price from about $25 for the SD to CF adapter to about $30 for the microSDHC to CF adapter. Though the microSDHC model with the RAID controller won’t be available until mid-July.

[ PhotoFast CF Adapters ] VIA [ Akihabara News ]

By Shane McGlaun

I used to try to carry a flash drive with me when I had a real job and actually left the house on occasion. More often than not, I left it at home because I forgot to pick it up and put it in my pocket. I tried a small flash drive that could fit in my wallet once, but it was too thick and made sitting uncomfortable.

A company called TopTech Products has announced a new flash drive that is shaped like a credit card and appears thin enough to not be a pain in the rear when sitting. The drive measures 3.4-inches x 2.1-inches x 0.11-inches.

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By Andrew Liszewski

Buffalo just upped the capacity of their itty-bitty 5mm Thumbkey USB flash drives from 8GB to 16GB, making them the perfect way to easily lose a big chunk of data. The drives should be available from Geek Stuff 4 U in black, red or white sometime near the end of June with a price tag of about $136. Expensive yes, but a ridiculously easy way to increase the storage space on your netbook.

[ Buffalo 16GB 5mm Thumbkey ] VIA [ Akihabara News ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Until now, the fastest SD/SDHC cards you could buy were known as Class 6, which ensured a transfer rate of at least 6MB/s. But today Panasonic announced a new series of Class 10 SD/SDHC cards with capacities maxing out at 32GB and a minimal transfer rate of 10MB/s. Of course that 32GB card will set you back about $420, but it does come with a maximum speed of 22MB/s which should make owners of a DSLR with an SD card slot very happy, though somewhat poorer.

[ Panasonic Class 10 SDHC Cards ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]

By Shane McGlaun

Keeping the games, controllers and game console tidy and stored out of the way when not in use can be a big issue for some users. Entertainment centers are often too small often leaving a tangled mess of wires and games lying around.

A new storage product for game consoles and accessories called Game On has been unveiled. The device can be mounted to the wall and has an upper shelf that holds games and a lower shelf that holds the game console itself.

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