A clock made of old hard disk drive.

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Check out this 6 oz. Verbatim InSight USB hard drive. Sporting a shiny piano black finish, the InSight in its durable enclosure is oddly reminiscent of a digital scale with its LCD in front. But unlike a scale, the 128 x 32-pixel screen on the Verbatim hard drive displays the drive name and the remaining capacity even when USB cord is pulled. We bet Verbatim envisions the future when everyone would own at least several of these InSight’s and heavily rely on the Always On LCD for drive identification.

However, with today’s portable drive capacity breaking 1TB mark, we can squeeze so much data inside a single enclosure that a better portable indexing and searching program might be what users really want. Instead Verbatim gives us Nero BackupItUp Essentials, complete with auto system backup and data encryption. Expect Verbatim InSight 320GB and 500GB backed by a 5-year warranty to hit retail at around $120 and $150 respectively.

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Let’s face it – computer geeks collect files. Many of them large, some of them illicit, and perhaps even one or two illegal. Hey, we’re not here to judge – we’re here to help! Those files often live on hard-drives that occasionally get upgraded. The old drive gets ripped out in favor of the new in the never-ending effort to increase storage capacity. That doesn’t mean, however, that those old drives have outlived their usefulness.
You can dock just about any of those old drives into this simple device. Sick a USB transfer cable into one end along with the power-cable, and in one of the other ends, you can connect a 3.5″ IDE hard drive, or a laptop 2.5″ IDE drive, or even a miniscule 1.8″ IDE hard drive! But, why stop there?
You can connect a SATA drive, too! How about an optical disk drive? We’ve got it covered. Blu-Ray, DVD, CD, writeable, rewriteable… it doesn’t matter! We’re drive agnostic with our USB to SATA/IDE Combo Kit. Now your old drives have a brand new life. Or, if you’re the handy type, you can keep this one device handy to recover data from a drive in a dead computer. You won’t have to haul several different devices – just this one!

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This is a large size desktop hard disk for storing movies, tv shows, music / mp3s, and photos. You can also load multiple operating systems using vmware or other software for testing purpose. This hard disk comes with 5 year warranty and can transfer at 300MB/s.

It’s been more than 18 months since Hitachi reached the terabyte mark with the Deskstar 7K1000. In that time, all the major players in the hard drive industry have spun up terabytes of their own, and in some cases, offered multiple models targeting different markets. With so many options available and more than enough time for the milestone capacity’s initial buzz to fade, it’s no wonder that the current crop of 1TB drives is more affordable than we’ve ever seen from a flagship capacity. The terabyte, it seems, is old news.

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Sharkoon’s Quickport is an elegant docking station for Serial-ATA drives, letting you attach them without having to open your PC. The Quickport is equipped with a USB interface, making it universally usable. But is that all?

You can never have enough hard disk space. After all, disks just fill up far too quickly these days, inevitably forcing you to buy a new drive. The side effect of this strategy is that you’ll sound find yourself the master of a good sized collection of magnetic storage media – especially if you’re a photographer, work with lots of video or simply enjoy recording TV shows to your computer.

The trouble is that PCs are equipped with only a limited number of connection options. Once all of the internal interfaces are in use, you have to use one of the external ones. Until now, this required a USB or Firewire adapter or even an external HDD enclosure. All of these solutions are comparatively cumbersome to use.

Installing the HDDs in your computer’s case when switching between different disks means you’ll always need to use a screwdriver. The steps of this procedure: open the case, find the connectors, arrange the cables, attach them, install the medium, close the case. If you have to do this frequently, you’ll soon begin to favour the “convertible” version – you’ll either use your case “with the top down” (i.e. open), or rout the cables outside so you can attach the drives more quickly.

The Serial ATA specification allows for a hard drive to be connected to a running PC thanks to a feature called Hot Plug ‘n’ Play. In practice, more often than not the end result is that your PC will crash, losing your data as it reboots itself. Obviously, this is not a viable solution.

This is where Sharkoon comes in with its Quickport. This docking station is designed to rest stably and firmly on your desk. All you have to do is insert the drive into the slot on the top of the device, saving you all of the hassle with running cables. Only the Quickport itself needs to be connected to the PC via USB cable. Just seconds after the docking station is switched on, the freshly created USB drive will show up in your system – no drivers needed.

Read the full review @ Tom’s Hardware >>>