GadgetReview

While the mass adoption of USB 3.0 is currently a long, dark and lonely road, a few storage companies have come forth with details regarding their impending drives that boast such compatibility.

Coming December 11th (of this year) Dane-elec’s line of USB 3.0 compatible hard drives, called Superspeed, will be available for purchase starting at $149.99.  Course at that price you’ll be scoring just 500GB of storage, but drop another $100 (or so) and you’ll quadruple your storage capacity.  Throw a bit more cash around and you’ll get your hands on an SSD version, which of course will maximize the drive’s USB 3.0 abilities of 250mbps.  …Continue reading: Dane-elec Announces USB 3.0 Hard Drives, Superspeed SO

If you’re looking for media streaming on a very, VERY tight budget, then the Patriot media streamer is EXACTLY what you had in mind.  You’ll need to bring your own hard disk drive, but each Patriot comes with a remote, three USB slots, Ethernet support and support for several different file formats.

Sure, it’s not that great that you have to provide your own hard drive before this thing will actually work, but given the price of the unit and the hard drive itself, chances are you’ll be doing all right.  They provide everything else–all you have to do is bring your picnic basket and enjoy.

And when I said, “very, VERY tight budget”, I meant it.  This sucker retails for a downright reasonable $130.  Of course, you’ll have to tack on a little extra for the hard drive, but new ones aren’t so pricey these days.

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Sometimes, you wish you could get access to shaky, variable quality information about just about any topic.  it’s times like these that we usually turn to the internet–but what if we’re away from the wireless internet or what have you?

That’s where the WikiReader device comes in.  It’s powered by two AAA batteries that are estimated to last a full year in this device, and comes with a monochrome touchscreen so you can scroll and track things.

I admit, it’s probably pretty cool to have access to three million articles worth of Wikipedia, especially wherever you happen to be at the time.  Updates are delivered on a quarterly basis, and you can also get a microSD card option added to your WikiReader for just an extra $29 a year.  It will probably do horrible things to barroom trivia contests–NTN is probably freaking out and wetting itself as we speak–but the idea is still plenty cool.

The base unit itself costs $99, and will be available on Amazon on the order of Real Soon Now.

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I like buying my combs at the dollar store.  Then I have them scattered about my place, car, and bike bag.  I have a tornado of a weave that needs constant attention and combing.  Why duct tape one of the many USB drives I got from CES to one of my many combs when I can buy a (comb)ination of the two?

For $35, you can buy this 2GB comb/USB drive to effectively render you a person of value and desire. The social implications would be stammering for all I can tell, and I would never tell anyone I actually bought this.  How long till’ this thing breaks on you?

[via CraziestGadgets]

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I’m not sure why you’d ever want a tiny spycam built into an equally tiny bedside clock–the less savory application would probably be too impractical as this is a VERY tiny clock–but just in case you’ve got an urge to keep a clock and a camera by your bedside, $47 will indulge your clock / camera desires with the Tiny Spy Camcorder Clock.

The internal Li-Battery will offer two hours of continuous use, and has four gig of built in memory.  It can also patch into your computer with an included USB cable so you can swap out data on the fly, clearing out the clock’s internal memory to continue recording.

If you’ve always wanted to watch yourself sleep, or just hope you can record something else, then the Tiny Spy Camcorder Clock is what you’re after.  Otherwise, I can’t imagine anyone either wanting or needing such a thing.

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At this point in the game it’s pretty difficult to make significant improvements on the good old external hard drive.  So what’s a storage company to do?  Simple.  Add a display that details the drive’s contents and storage capacity.  That’s what Verbatim did and now so has Western Digital.  They’ve added E-Ink displays to their My Book Studio and My Book Elite external hard drive that lets you add your own label and best of all it works when the drive is unplugged.

Read – My Book Elite
Read – My Book Studio

Thanko doesn’t exactly have a good record when it comes to their gadgets, folks, but here’s an exciting piece of news–apparently their MP4 viewer is coming to be regarded as a solid buy!

Now that’s exciting enough as it is–it’s almost like saying “Man, this fried cockroach tastes delicious!”–but not only will this little item, the DIGITAL MP4 AudioPlayer AV, play your MP4 videos, but it also serves as a digital camera.  It has 8GB of onboard memory, with miniSD cards fully supported, even if they only work with Microsoft XP and Microsoft Vista.

Moreover, it also includes a 4.3-inch screen, a mini remote, two mini speakers and an estimated battery life of four to six hours, making this one of the most portable media viewers ever.  Thanko is already selling this device to Japanese customers–word is that the English store will be selling it soon, in case you want to take the chance that this is Thanko’s best product ever.

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How much storage does it take to store a human life?

That’s a dangerous and highly subjective question, but according to Gordon Bell, a researcher at Microsoft, the average human being’s life requires three hundred and fifty gigabytes to adequately store it all.

On the surface, that seems low.  Given that the average two hour DVD runs about four gig, on a strict conversion scale, three hundred and fifty gigabytes would represent about eighty eight, give or take a few minutes, hours of video.  A human life is vastly more than eighty eight hours of video.  But then, we really don’t know what kind of compression or resolution we’re talking about–after all, my last dream involving sideswiping a Rolls-Royce that had Caterpillar-style tank treads instead of tires really wasn’t anywhere near the resolution of a regular DVD, and it absolutely didn’t have anything on Blu-ray.

But what this means is even more interesting.  Or exciting, or terrifying depending on how you choose to look at it.  Any schmuck off the street with a part-time job can afford a terabyte hard drive.  That’s effectively enough to store his entire life and consciousness almost three times over, and four times if he pops for the one and a half terabyte model.

So the question remains…how long before someone tries the upload?

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Netgear, who I’ve long associated with routers and other networking products, has introduced a NAS enabled hard drive that should make sharing your social media all that much easier.

Called the Stora, the 1TB hard drive connects to your home’s Internet connection using its built-in Ethernet plug.  Once you’ve done that, any computer connected on the network can easily upload photos, videos and music to the hard drive.  If you want to share your photos, from say a Safari trip (I just got back from one) just upload the photos to the hard drive and instead of uploading them to a Flickr or Picasa, you can simply provide your friends with the www.MyStora.com URL, which allows them to access the drive’s contents.  Keep in mind you’ll have to designate the users, though.

The drive also boasts RAID mirroring – you’ll need to buy another hard drive – and is DLNA compatible.  The Stora is available now for $229 and includes a 1TB drive. …Continue reading: Netgear’s Stora NAS Hard Drive Makes It Easy To Share Music, Photos And Videos With Friends (video)

USB 3.0 might be a few years away from mass adoption, but that hasn’t stopped Freecom from introducing the first ever USB 3.0 compatible external hard drive.  Available in capacities 1TB, 1.5Tb and 2TB, the Hard Drive XS 3.0 will be available this November starting at $175.  And just in case someone happens to toss one of these into your stocking, fear not for it is USB 2.0 compatible.

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