Western Digital today announced the next generation of its top-selling My Passport line of portable hard drives, offering consumers a fresh new enclosure design and the first-ever 2 TB capacity in a portable drive. Now available in five popular colors: white, black, silver, blue, and red, with a range of capacities beginning from 500 GB, the new sleeker My Passport portable drives offer digital consumers an appealing array of storage options that reflect their personal style. Additionally, the new My Passport drives offer WD SmartWare™ automatic backup software and WD Security™ for password protection and hardware encryption.

With the addition of premium finishes, specially-engineered to make the outer shell more resistant to scratches and fingerprints, the new My Passport external drives feature ultra-fast USB 3.0 connectivity; USB 2.0 compatibility; continuous, automatic backup software; and password protection with hardware encryption. The included software offers the flexibility to customize the drive to a user's storage preferences: installing all features, just the components needed, or using the drive without the software.The new 2 TB model offers massive capacity in an amazing pocket-sized enclosure, affording plenty of secure storage for all of one's photos, video, music and other important files.

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Transcend Information, Inc. (Transcend), a worldwide leader in storage and multimedia products, is proud to showcase the extraordinary performance capabilities and new higher capacity of the next generation SATA III 6Gb/s SSD720 solid state drive (SSD). Built with industry-leading 24nm toggle-mode MLC NAND flash chips and now available in extra-large capacities up to 512GB, an SSD720-equipped computer boots-up faster, games run more smoothly, and overall system responsiveness is improved.

Taking full advantage of the latest SATA III 6Gb/s specification and driven by a powerful SandForce controller, the SSD720 boasts impressive sequential read/write transfer speeds of up to 560MB/540MB per second and lightning-fast 4k random file writes up to 86,000 IOPS. This exceptional performance translates into ultra low response times, launching heavy graphics applications, such as Adobe Photoshop and Premiere CS5, and AutoCAD 2011, in under three seconds. Completing file operations at least three times faster and providing ultra-low access latencies by avoiding platter seek time, the SSD720 is the ideal drop-in replacement for standard rotating hard drives (HDDs).

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Synology America Corp today announced the latest release in its high-performance 4-bay DiskStation family: the DS412+. The DS412+ is well-suited for business users, offering a good mix of price, performance, and capacity.

The new 4-bay server features a brand new case design. The new model allows hot-swap capability. It is Synology’s first 4-bay server to add support for USB 3.0. Dual NICs allow for link aggregation or failover, helping users get the most performance and reliability. The DS412+ uses passive cooling on the CPU and adaptive behavior on the dual exhaust fans to increase uptime and remove points of failure.

“With the attractive new case design and DSM 4.0, the DS412+ should make a welcome addition to nearly any office,” said Doug Self, Product Marketing Manager at Synology America Corp. “Priced under $650, it makes for an excellent value.”

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Today, CDRLabs brings you a review of Lite-On's external slim Blu-ray combo drive, the eSEU206. This lightweight, USB-powered drive is capable of 8x DVD±R, 8x DVD+RW, 6x DVD-RW, 4x DVD±R DL and 5x DVD-RAM writing speeds and can read Blu-ray Discs at speeds as high as 6x. The eSEU206 also offers support for HP's LightScribe Direct Disc Labeling system as well as Lite-On's own SMART technologies. To top it all off, the drive comes with CyberLink's Blu-ray Disc Suite which includes software capable of playing back Blu-ray movies in 3D.