April 9, 2007 5:00 AM PDT

Park a Ferrari on your desk

by Felisa Yang

Fabrik announced today a new family of sleek desktop hard drives that incorporates 2GB of free online storage through the company's MyFabrik Web service: SimpleDrive. The new drives (designed by Pininfarina, longtime designer of the Ferrari) come in several capacities, which are color-coded: 160GB (red); 250GB (white); 320GB (blue); 500GB (black); 750GB (charcoal); and 1TB (charcoal). All feature a single, 3.5-inch hard drive from Hitachi, including the 1TB version. This is the first single-disk, 1TB external hard drive on the market.

The SimpleDrive comes in sleek, colorful cases.

(Credit: Fabrik)

Initially, all versions will ship with USB 2.0 interfaces, but in May, Fabrik plans to ship a USB/FireWire version as well. A top-mounted button is configured for one-click backup, using the bundled ArcSoft backup software.

As cool and sleek as the drives look, though, the most compelling feature is the free 2GB of MyFabrik storage space. MyFabrik is an online storage solution that allows you to upload various file types (including photos, videos, music, and documents) to the Fabrik "cloud" and organize, tag, and share your files with others. (Rafe Needleman discussed MyFabrik Lite, a pared-down version of MyFabrik, over at Webware.) Every SimpleDrive comes with a MyFabrik account with 2GB of free user space. (If 2GB isn't enough for you, you can purchase additional space for a fee of 49 cents per GB.) New improvements to the MyFabrik solution include preset folders for photo-sharing sites like Photobucket and Flickr, and new, more flexible layouts for public pages. If you already have images loaded to a site such as Flickr, you can direct your MyFabrik account that way and it will automatically grab those images to be organized in your MyFabrik space.

MyFabrik lets you upload, tag, organize, and share files.

(Credit: Fabrik)

The new SimpleDrive is competitively priced, especially considering the MyFabrik premium. The drives start at $100 for the 160GB version and $200 for the 500GB version. (Pricing has yet to be set for the 750GB and 1TB versions.) We should be getting a test unit in for review soon, so check back for a full review.