Are you a hard-core Batman fan? Do you ever wish you could put on some tights and a cape and go bust a move some criminals? Ooor, maybe you just can’t get enough of officially licensed Batman merchandise? Regardless of how far your fanaticism stretches, the MIMOBOT Designer Batman USB Flash Drives are here to satisfy all your data-transferring needs – while celebrating one of the coolest comic book characters of all time!

These Batman, Robin, and Joker USB 2.0 flash drives are officially licensed by DC Comics and each include a 4GB capacity. Compatible with both PC and Mac, the drives also come loaded with all kinds of digital goodies such as: wallpapers for your desktop, iPad, or cell phone as well as screensavers, icons, and online avatars.

Available at Vat19.com for $27.95, the MIMOBOT Designer Batman USB Flash Drives will have you packin’ files Gotham-style!

TV used to be broadcast in black and white, at Commodore 64 resolutions and over a number of channels that could be counted on one hand. Televisions themselves were also half the size of a living room, were full of valves, made strange high-pitched noises and probably gave you radiation poisoning. That sort of television has long been banished to the history books, but something like the Western Digital 1TB TV Live Media Center really demonstrates how far the goggle-box has come.

Whatever your existing TV-set up, the Western Digital TV Live HD Media Center integrates with any digital media you like, so that watching TV, downloading movies, browsing the web, listening to music and watching slide-shows are all part of the same party.

This media center gives you a colossal 1 Terabyte of storage, archiving vast quantities of on-demand HD video, music and photos that can be pumped out through ethernet, HDMI, USB 2.0, composite A/V, component video and optical audio connections.

Beyond the 1TB local storage, the TV Live HD Media Center’s internet connectivity gives you access to the trillions of terabytes of media on the web too. Just imagine: cats playing piano, in full HD, on your TV!

Who said TV’s dead? Probably no-one. But if they had…the Western Digital TV Live Media Center would have proved them wrong.

Available now from Firebox.com for $292 | £180 | €209.

If you need access to your personal documents, photos or movies when away from home, this highly acclaimed gadget called the Pogoplug is your key to managing your files easily from wherever you roam.

Billed as “the personal cloud”, the Pogoplug connects any USB hard drive to the Internet, letting you stream songs or download documents stored at home from a web browser at work – or even on your iPhone, iPad or Android device when out-and-about.

Better still, there are no storage fees or limits you get in the commercial cloud, and you can even digitally drag your homework home ready for the after-hours slog or send that webpage or pdf you couldn’t finish reading at lunch to print remotely and instantly on your home printer. Literary leftovers, hot off the press.

With no software to install, the Pogoplug is just like using a drive physically connected to your computer and is accessible through both Windows Explorer and Mac Finder.

Setup is simple. Just hook-up the Pogoplug to a wall outlet, connect it to your router (with the supplied network cable), attach your USB hard drive or memory stick and pop over to my.pogoplug.com to register the device. 4-steps? That’s right! No IP addresses or nuttin. Just bother-free, network attached storage in seconds. Brilliant!

If that’s not enough, you can even quickly share your photos and movies with family and friends without spending hours uploading them to Facebook and YouTube. Simply designate (and restrict) access to whomever you please via the secure online interface and send them a link. Too easy.

Letting you access your world from anywhere in the world, the Pogoplug is available now from Firebox.com (rated 4.47 / 5 stars from 59 customer reviews) for a very reasonable $125 | £80 | €95.

Apple quietly updated their Time Capsule lineup yesterday adding a newer, more capacious 2TB version whilst removing the smaller 500GB model.

If you’re unfamiliar with Apple‘s Time Capsule, it is essentially a wireless backup device and WiFi router in one. It works with both Mac and PC, but excels when used in-sync with the company’s brilliant Time Machine backup/archival software built-into Mac OS X Leopard. This combo wirelessly captures the state of your Mac (including all software, files and settings) with each backup to make recovery easy should your hard disk fail, or you misplace or delete a file, or a buggy software update cripples your computer. You can return to a previous state of your choosing, which may not necessarily be your last backup.

Time Machine works with most external storage devices out there, but you have to remember to do regular back-ups and manually connect them to each computer that needs backing up. The beauty of the Time Capsule is that when used in conjunction with Time Machine, performs scheduled backups wirelessly – on all your computers – while you work. Or play.

Both the original and updated 500GB models have been quietly dropped from the Apple Store, but can still be found (at heavily discounted prices) from resellers. If you were contemplating purchasing this drive in the past but balked at the price (like I did), now might be the time to grab one before they all disappear.

The 1TB Time Capsule meanwhile has received a large retail price cut from $499 to $299 with some stores pushing that further to $288.99. This price actually brings the Time Capsule more in line with basic 1TB external drives on the market and thus, should now sell like crazy.

The new 2TB Time Capsule now includes support for up to 50 concurrent users and offers faster WiFi – operating simultaneously on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. A new guest networking function lets you share your Internet connection without sharing your password and is available now, retailing for $499.00 | £379.00 at the Apple Store. The 2TB model can also be purchased from both OnSale and MacMall for a reduced $479.99.

Sources:
Apple and MacMall

Following on from their Transformer backup device we saw back in January, Clickfree have introduced a diminutive, slimline solid state drive called the Traveler – that is as small as a credit card.

The Clickfree Traveler is available in capacities of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB and is programmed to automatically backup your most important data via its auto-launch feature – as soon as you plug it into an available USB port.

The drive is said to be “light as a pen” and can be kept conveniently in your wallet, much like Samsung’s credit card-sized HDD and the Credit Card Calculator, ready to be pulled out in a flash.

The Clickfree Traveler is compatible with both PC and Mac and will set you back $80 | £53 for the 16GB, $150 | £99 for the 32GB and $250 | £166 for the 64GB model direct from the Clickfree Store.

Sources:
BusinessWire (Press Release)
Via: Register Hardware and CrunchGear

Not to be outdone by WD’s 2TB breakthrough last week, Seagate have announced their own 2TB monster in the form of the 3.5-inch Constellation ES. The disk runs at 7200RPM, which gives it an edge over its 5400RPM rival, as well as an SAS 2.0 interface for blazing transfer speeds of up to 6Gbps.

The Constellation ES Series also includes a 1TB and 500GB version and if you’re lacking a setup with an SAS 2.0 interface, the drives will also be offered with a SATA connection. You’ll only get half of that sweet 6Gbps though. These enterprise-grade drives are rated at a full 1.2 million hours MTBF (provided there aren’t any firmware issues).

There is no pricing info as yet, but it shouldn’t be far off from the $299 of WD’s Caviar Green. Probably less. I guess we’ll just have to wait until the summer, when these spinners are slated to begin shipping, before we know for sure.

Sources:
Seagate (Press Release) via Electronista

After an earlier leak by an Australian distributor, Western Digital have officially announced their breakthrough 2TB Caviar Green SATA HDD, which marks an industry first as the highest capacity single disk hard drive. The drive tops Seagate’s 1.5TB Barracuda announced back in July and uses the same four platter design, only manages to squeeze a massive 500GB into each one.

The drive uses Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Technology to achieve the huge capacity (400 Gb/in2 areal density) and comes with a 32MB cache and claims of cool and quiet operation. WD’s StableTrac tech secures both ends of the motor shaft to reduce vibration and IntelliPower balances spin speed to achieve better acoustical and energy performance.

The drive is a single 3.5-inch SATA internal hard drive, unlike some drives that are really two drives set up in a RAID configuration. The 2TB model, the WD20EADS, has a retail price of $299 and is available now.

Full Press Release Below:

LAKE FOREST, Calif. Jan. 27 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — WD (NYSE: WDC) today announced the first 2 terabyte (TB) hard drive – the world’s highest capacity drive and the latest addition to WD’s popular, environmentally friendly, cool and quiet, WD® Caviar® Green hard drive family. This new 3.5-inch platform is based on WD’s industry-leading 500 GB/platter technology (with 400 Gb/in2 areal density) with 32 MB cache, producing drives with capacities of up to 2 TB.

“While some in the industry wondered if the end consumer would buy a 1 TB drive, already some 10 percent of 3.5-inch hard drive sales are at the 1 TB level or higher, serving demand from video applications and expanding consumer media libraries,” said Mark Geenen, President of Trend Focus. “The 2 TB hard drives will continue to satisfy end user’s insatiable desire to store more data on ever larger hard drives.”

WD Caviar Green is one of the most successful product lines in the company’s recent history with its third-generation GreenPower technology, now providing 2 TB of proven reliable storage for today’s high-resolution files and graphics. WD Caviar Green drives are designed for use in USB/FireWire®/eSATA external hard drives, desktop computers, workstations, and desktop RAID environments.

“Saving power without sacrificing storage capacity is what consumers want, and what many businesses are requiring today. With the launch of the new WD Caviar Green 2 TB hard drive, customers receive the additional capacities needed to operate today’s highly advanced programs and high-resolution digital files while using less power than typical drives with similar performance and capacities,” said Jim Morris, WD senior vice president and general manager of client systems.

Rock Solid Mechanical Architecture, Cool, Quiet Hard Drives
A number of advanced technologies enable the speed, capacity and performance of WD’s Caviar Green 1.5 TB and 2 TB hard drives. Those include: StableTrac, which secures the motor shaft at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations; IntelliPower, which fine-tunes the balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance; IntelliSeek, which calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration(1); and NoTouch ramp load technology, which is designed to ensure the recording head never touches the disk media resulting in significantly less wear to the recording head and media, as well as better drive protection while in transit.

Availability and Pricing
The WD Caviar Green 2 TB is available at select resellers and distributors. MSRP for the WD Caviar Green 2 TB hard drives (model WD20EADS) is $299.00 USD. More information about WD Caviar Green desktop drives may be found on the company’s Web site at http://wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=576

Sources:
Western Digital (Press Release) via Register Hardware

Toshiba have today announced a new line of flash-based 2.5-inch notebook SSDs that mark an industry first with a top storage capacity of 512GB. The drives are based on 43 nanometer Multi-Level Cell NAND and will be displayed at the upcoming CES 2009 in January.

Mass-production of the drives is slated for the second quarter of 2009 and will be produced in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities in addition to the groundbreaking 512GB model. The drives will all get a 3Gbps SATA-II connection with a maximum read speed of 240MBps, a zippy 200MBps write speed and AES data encryption.

The THNS512GG8BB 512-gig drive should help fulfill the growing need for more capacious SSDs for laptops and enable the technology to better compete with its HDD rivals.

Sources:
PR Newswire (Press Release)

Toshiba today announced a new world first for 1.8-inch drives with their MK2529GSG model which holds an impressive 250GB. The 5,400rpm drive uses a SATA interface with a 3Gbps data transfer rate, has a seek time of just 15ms and is a mere 8mm (0.31-inch) thin, making it ideal for ultra-portable laptops and portable media players.

The drive manages to top Toshiba’s former world record, which was set only a few weeks ago with their 240GB MK2431GAH drive. This further improves upon their 160GB MK1617GSG record in June.

This new model not only has improved storage capacity, but is also zippier thanks to the inclusion of a SATA interface. It should provide some stiff competition to the slim but expensive Solid State Drives on offer for ultra-portables.

The MK2529GSG measures a mere 54mm (2.13″) x 78.5mm (3.09″) x 8mm (0.31″) and has a weight of 62g (2.18 ounces). The drive is scheduled for mass production in November.

Sources:
Toshiba Press Release (translated) via CrunchGear