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A USB drive for your neck

We'd pretty much given up on posting any more items about USB storage keys--not because we have anything against them, mind you, but we just couldn't keep up with their kudzu-like proliferation. (Except for the poker chip versions, of course.)

But leave it to those insane-asylum escapees at Brando to come up with one more that we couldn't pass up. The "USB Neck Strap" has a built-in flash drive with 2GB of memory and can also hold a variety of other items that are prone to misplacement, such as keys and even a mobile … Read more

New standard to curb data corruption on drives

The International Disk Drive, Equipment and Materials Association has finalized a standard that, ideally, will make it easier to find errors on hard drives.

The standard, called Long Block Data, essentially will compartmentalize data in blocks consisting of of 4,096 bytes of data rather than 512 byte blocks of data, the standard for years. The problem is that, with the rapid increases in density, the 512 byte segments occupy too little space on the surface of a platter of a hard drive. There are also way too many of them.

By quadrupuling the size of the segments, the errors … Read more

Harman Kardon turns drive time into play time--again

Harman Kardon is just about to unleash the successor to its Drive + Play iPod interface, and we got a sneak preview of the new system this week. Imaginatively called the Drive + Play 2, the stylish device offers tons more features than its predecessor did, including the ability to show album art, an alphabetic search function, and a unique means of refining playlists on the move. The DP2 will be hitting shelves next week with a price tag of around $400. Check out our Crave slide show for all the info as well as some beauty shots.

Meet the ultimate in hipster hard drives

Those little black Moleskine notebooks, once the scribble space of choice for Picasso and Hemingway, are now pretty much known as mandatory gear for brooding coffee-shop hipsters and aspiring indie rockers. But little did we know, they also make great external hard drives. A blogger by the name of Sebastian Delmont recently noticed a correlation between the sizes of his Moleskine journal and a hard drive, and cleverly realized that he could modify one of the sleek black books as the external casing for an internal laptop hard drive--saving a lot of cash in the process.

And there you have … Read more

Hitachi ships its terabyte drive

If you've got $399 and a burning need to story 1 terabyte of data, Hitachi has the drive for you.

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is now available at retailers like CDW for a suggested retail price of $399. The company announced the drive earlier.

Although hard drive makers compete in a difficult market that often results in losses for many companies, their engineers nonetheless move at a blistering pace. Hard drive capacity continues to double about every two years, which leads to higher capacity at lower prices.

How much is a terabyte? … Read more

Poker-chip USB drive is a good bet

With USB storage keys ranging from the ridiculous to the obnoxious, we were beginning to think that it was impossible to find one that we'd even consider buying. But leave it to a game of chance to restore what little faith we had in product marketing.

Memorex's "Poker Chip Flash Drive" is a bit late to the poker party that's become a national craze, but it makes up for much of that with an admirable design that conceals its 1GB key in what looks like a stack of three clay chips. In keeping with the … Read more

A drive-in movie for the backyard

As much as we love bleeding-edge media technologies, Crave occasionally still pines for certain forms of entertainment from yesteryear. And few things make us more nostalgic than the drive-in movie.

Now you can do your part to revive this nearly extinct phenomenon in the privacy of your own backyard with a 24-foot inflatable screen for sale on eBay. This monster system from VXP, which includes a projector, speakers, DVD player and other various equipment, has a "Buy It Now" price of $14,995 on the auction, which ends Saturday. (Don't worry, the listing indicates that two are … Read more

Samsung spinning up 200GB, 2.5-inch drive

That darned hard drive industry just keeps giving us excuses not to weed out all those old files on the laptop.

Samsung on Wednesday announced a new 2.5-inch hard drive, taking a step ahead of the herd with a 200GB model with a 7200rpm rotation speed.

The SpinPoint MP1 line also will be available in 80GB, 120GB and 160GB capacities when it begins shipping in May, the Korean electronics giant said. The drives use a 3-gigabit-per-second SATA connection and will have 8MB or 16MB of cache memory.

Faster rotational speeds allow drives to find data more quickly and transfer … Read more

Dell rolls out massive laptop hard drives

Laptops are all about cramming the most stuff into the least amount of space, so the Interwebs are rightfully buzzing about the latest offerings found in the Dell and Alienware online system configurators.

With no prerelease hype, you can now order an Alienware m9700or Dell XPS M2010 with a gigantic 250GB 2.5-inch hard drive (running at 5,400rpm)--or even pair two drives up for half a terabyte of ripped DVDs data storage.

That's better than the 160GB drives most laptops topped out at until now, but what's all that extra capacity going to cost you? For … Read more