Oh! Gizmo

By Andrew Liszewski

Compact flash cards are slowly but surely being pushed out of the digital camera market by SD cards, but there are still plenty of cameras, particularly digital SLRs, that rely on the older format. So companies like RIDATA haven’t given up on CF just yet, and to prove it they’ve just introduced an updated version they call the SMART compact flash card.

As far as I can tell what makes these cards ‘SMART’ is a new internal data monitoring system that works to ensure you never experience any data loss. While having 16GB of storage in your camera is great, it’s not a pleasant feeling when something happens to the only card you’ve been shooting with the past few days. And besides extra data monitoring, the cards also include embedded error correction code (ECC) that supports “two random bits of a sector on-the-fly ECC corrections.” I’ll assume that’s a good thing.

The new cards even offer longer reliability, with a Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) of 5,000,000 powered-on hours, and 100,000 times of program/erase cycles. The SMART CF cards will be available in two series, a Supreme 150X version with a capacity of up to 8GB, and a Lightning version with a capacity of up 16GB.

[ RIDATA SMART Compact Flash Cards ] VIA [ Digital Photography Review ]

By Andrew Liszewski

I’ve been enjoying my Asus EEE PC for the past few weeks now, but filling up its 4GB drive that was already over half full with the OS wasn’t difficult. So I’ve been on the hunt for a considerably larger external USB drive that’s compact and won’t drain my battery.

The good news is that this new 100GB SSD external drive from Buffalo perfectly fits the bill. It has an integrated USB cable and when you compare the size of the USB connection to the rest of the drive, it’s obviously a lot smaller than even a 2.5 inch notebook hard drive. The bad news is that we’re still in the infancy of SSD storage and this drive will set you back about $885, which is tough to justify when you can buy 2 more EEEs for that kind of money.

[ Buffalo SHD-UHRS ] VIA [ Akihabara News ]

By Evan Ackerman

External HD designs don’t generally excite me. Most of the time, I just want it to store my crap without any additional fluff, you know? But, this USB HD concept from Green Banana does an impressive job of integrating aesthetics with functionality. The drive case contains an OLED screen, which changes depending on the contents of the drive. Each file is represented by a shape proportional to the filesize (and a color related to the file type, perhaps?), and as you add more files, the shapes diversify. Not only does it look pretty cool, but it shows you at a glance how much space is left on your drive, and can even clue you in on what the drive is being used for.

This is only a concept, but if you like the file visualization idea, you can download a free copy of the software that the IVY display is based on here; it’s called SequoiaView.

[ Green Banana ] VIA [ Next Nature ]

By Evan Ackerman

The Chocolate Portable HD may not actually be much more complicated than a USB hub and a bunch of flash drives, but its modular form factor suggests a variety of uses. For example, you could sort your files onto individual chocolate pieces, and then when (or if) you go to work, you can just take your work piece of chocolate with you. Each piece has a different label, and the center portion of the hub is a touchscreen that helps you keeps your files organized. It would be cool if there were some RAID options built in, too… Heck, while you’re at it, just stick Linux on there and make a UMPC out of it. Sure, that defeats the purpose, but it would be cool, wouldn’t it?

VIA [ Yanko ]

By Evan Ackerman

You say “tomato,” I say “tomato…” Okay, that doesn’t quite work in writing, but either way you say it, the Tomato D-18 is a slick little USB HD. Yes, USB HDs are a dime a dozen now, but this one is really small. The 60gb Seagate 1.8 inch magnetic HD is barely a third of an inch thick, and the brushed aluminum case doesn’t add much to that. It requires no external power apart from the USB cable, and has 3 LEDs and some attractive designs (as well as a bunch of color options) on the case. From the looks of it, the HD might be replaceable/upgradeable, but you’re actually getting a decent deal at the moment, with the drive and case costing a combined $110ish (a glance at eBay shows 1.8″ 80gb drives going for around $90). Nothing fruity about that, which is good, since tomatoes are vegetables, after all.

[ Playtomato ] VIA [ PMP Today ]

By Andrew Liszewski

From my own experience, the best way to ensure no one can recover files from an old hard drive is to simply dismantle it. Once all the screws get lost there’s no easy to way to reassemble it, and on top of that you get a set of wicked powerful magnets to play with.

But if the drive is still in working order and is large enough to be useful in another system, you might want to consider the Drive eRazer alternative. You simply connect the device to your old hard drive and it will erase all the files by writing a data pattern over the entire disk. If you’re extra paranoid there is also a ‘Pro Version’ that will perform multiple passes while writing random characters. A 250GB drive can be wiped in just under 2 hours and because the eRazer is a standalone device, it doesn’t require an actual computer during the process.

The Standard version of the Drive eRazer designed for 3.5 inch drives is $99.95, while the Pro version is $149.95. The Notebook Pro version is also $149.95 and there’s a Pro version ‘Versatile’ bundle that works on both drive sizes (using adapters) for $199.95.

[ Drive eRazer ] VIA [ The Red Ferret Journal ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Instead of relying on a finger print reader to secure your data, which will work whether you’re conscious or not, this external drive enclosure actually has a touch screen that can be used to enter a secret PIN.

The ezSECU ez850 from IOTEK only supports 2.5 inch SATA hard drives, but at least that means it’s small and easy to carry around. And hopefully it uses a rechargeable battery to power that touch screen, so you don’t need to carry the bulky power adapter around as well. The enclosure supports USB 2 and Windows 2000/XP/Vista and Mac OS 9.2+.

[ ezSECU Portable External Hard Drive ] VIA [ Akihabara News ]

By Evan Ackerman

Most people I know aren’t nearly paranoid enough about their data. Imagine what your life would be like, in the short and long term, if your computer’s primary HD were to die right now. Sure, you wouldn’t be able to finish reading this article, but (believe it or not) it gets worse… Your work? Your irreplaceable digital photos? Your porn collection? All that music you got back when Napster was big? Poof, gone. That’s why backing up your data is important, but if you’ve got some really valuable stuff, you need a RAID system. Norazza’s PocketRAID is a teeny little external RAID 1 drive, which automatically duplicates everything that you write to it onto two separate 1.8 inch laptop drives. This means that if one drive fails, you’ve got everything backed up without having to think about it. It’s only 5 inches long and 1.5 inches high, and weighs under 2 pounds. It supports drives up to 160gb in size, which gives you 160gb of available mirrored storage. With USB 2.0 and eSATA interfaces, it’s both fast and versatile. MSRP is $439 for the smallest 60gb version, and $929 for the largest 160gb.

If you’re thinking that it sounds like an awful lot of money for a HD, ask yourself how much it would cost you, in time and money, to replace all of your MP3s and the digital pics you took while on vacation… Better safe than sorry, if you ask me.

[ Norazza PocketRAID ] VIA [ Engadget ]

By Andrew Liszewski

I’m all for organization, almost to an obsessive degree, but I don’t know if I’m really sold on the Battery Caddy. It was originally designed for pilots to carry batteries in their flight bag without them ending up all over the place, but is now available to anyone with similar organizational problems.

The caddies have special flexible teeth that ensures a battery won’t fall out no matter how much the caddy is banged around, and even has protection for the terminals on each end. But you know what I’ve found that also works great for storing batteries? Their original packaging. Brands like Duracell and Energizer already come in resealable plastic containers, and a pair of scissors is all you need to remove the cardboard top section making them even more compact. Keeping them in the original packaging also removes any doubt in my mind that they might have been used, but to each their own.

The Battery Caddy comes in a variety of sizes and configurations for carrying large or small amounts of the same size battery, or an assortment of different sizes. They also come in your choice of 7 different colors including a glow in the dark green, and range in price from as low as $4.95 up to $13.95.

[ Battery Caddy ] VIA [ The Gadgeteer ]