Hard drives have long ago found a way to bring a digital library into the living room. In order to transfer videos, pictures and music from PC data carriers to appropriately equipped televisions, digital receivers, gaming consoles or HD media players it needed an external hard drive enclosure. Unfortunately, these usually came in a functional PC component design.

An easy to use and suitable living room alternative is now introduced by Sharkoon. The accessory specialist has the pleasure of adding an elegant HiFi design to their QuickPort hard drive docking station. With its slim size, the Sharkoon SATA QuickPort Home assumes the look of a classic HiFi device due to its brushed aluminium front panel, which covers the entire display, and its black finish with round, silver foot stands.

Behind the front panel of the SATA QuickPort Home, two push-to-open slots for 3.5 and 2.5 inch SATA hard drives are hidden. As with other Sharkoon QuickPort models, handling is quite simple: Mounting the hard drive is not a time consuming endeavour, but merely inserted into its appropriate slot. The disk disappears completely into the housing. A preinstalled, temperature regulating fan ensures that the hard drive does not overheat during operation.

Add a comment

OCZ Technology Group, a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) and memory modules for computing devices and systems, has unveiled the OCZ Onyx 2 Series, a 2.5 inch SSD with superior affordability designed for mainstream desktops and mobile systems. Offering a faster and more durable alternative to traditional hard drives in a cost-efficient solution, the Onyx 2 delivers excellent performance with lower price per gigabyte than that of other comparable drives on the market.

"While we are constantly looking to push the envelope in solid state drive performance, we are also dedicated to making the technology more affordable to consumers," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of the OCZ Technology Group. "The new Onyx 2 Series SSDs give customers the very best of both worlds when it comes to performance and value, and they are an ideal solution for mobile and desktop users that want to take advantage of all the benefits that SSDs offer over traditional rotational based drives."

Add a comment

Verbatim is taking the next step in the Flash sector with its new SDXC class 10 memory card with 64GB storage capacity. The new SDXC (SD eXtended Capacity) Flash card is designed to handle large volumes of data at lightning speed and provides users more portable storage and speed for their electronic devices such as mobile phones, camcorders, digital cameras or game pads. The Verbatim SDXC 64GB class 10 card is available in stores now.

Two advances in technology make it possible to handle larger volumes of data than on SDHC cards. On the one hand the exFAT file system, on the other hand the UHS-I bus interface with speeds up to 104MB per second. While SDHC cards provide storage capacities up to 32GB only, the new SDXC (SD eXtended Capacity) memory card from Verbatim stores 64GB of data, offering enough space for over 20,000 10-megapixel JPEG images with fine mode or 8 hours recording with Full HD video mode. The exFAT file system enables the SDXC card to handle those large volumes of data. Additionally, the UHS-I bus interface transfers movies, videos, pictures, games, eBooks, mobile apps or navigation maps with speeds up to 104MB/s.

Add a comment

CDRLabs kicks off the week with a review of LG's latest Super Multi NAS, the N1T1. This single bay NAS device offers 1TB of storage as well as a built-in DVD writer. Along with the usual file and print services, the N1T1 features support for Apple's Time Machine, DLNA media streaming, torrent file sharing and the ability to backup data from CD's, DVD's and USB storage devices. Last but not least, the device can be configured for use as an external hard drive and DVD writer.