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New WD portable hard drive comes in style

You're going back to school and want to label your digital content with a little bit of fashion? Western Digital has something for you.

The company unveiled on Thursday the new 500GB My Passport Essential limited-edition portable hard drive. It's much like any other My Passport Essential hard drives with one big difference: the new drives come with several unique cover designs that supposedly fit a variety of personal styles.

According to Western Digital, these designs were made by students at California State University, Long Beach's Industrial Design program. The drives are available in five patterns: Boom … Read more

Get a 2.5-inch hard drive enclosure for $5.73

This is kind of an obscure deal, but hear me out. Remember last week when I mentioned that 500GB laptop hard drive for $50? When you perform a laptop drive-ectomy, you're left with that original drive, all naked and with nowhere to go.

That's where an enclosure comes into play. It turns a previously internal hard drive into a USB-powered external one. That's what I call getting extra bang for your upgrade buck.

Enclosures tend to run pretty cheap, but here's one that's cheap: Shop4tech has 2.5-inch SATA-to-USB drive enclosure for $5.73 shipped. … Read more

Installing OS X on an external drive: What to expect

One of the advantages OS X has over Windows is the easy ability to install OS X on practically any supported local volume, meaning that regardless of the hardware, if the volume can be mounted locally (as opposed to a network share) you should be able to install a copy of OS X to that volume and boot to it.… Read more

Hitachi unveils LifeStudio storage solutions

Recently, Seagate announced the GoFlex external hard drives, which are revolutionary in terms of their interface flexibility. Now Hitachi says it has an "industry first" of its own.

The company on Wednesday unveiled its latest in external hard drives, the new LifeStudio family. The drives are available in desktop and mobile versions, which share a new feature: the new Hitachi LifeStudio software designed to help users manage their "digital mess."

Hitachi bundles the software with any new LifeStudio external hard drive and it will launch automatically each time you connect the drive to a computer, be it a PC or a Mac. Apart from making data backup easy, the LifeStudio software is able to quickly find and organize digital content stored on any hard drive connected to the computer. For example, if you have a lot of photos and don't know where they're stored, the LifeStudio software helps find the one you need when you need it by automatically organizing them by date. It will display their thumbnails on a 3D wall in chronological order, somewhat like the Cover Flow feature on the iPod.

The software also integrates with social Web sites, such as Facebook and Flickr, and enables users to manage photo albums on these sites without having to use a Web browser to log in the traditional way. For example, from within the LifeStudio software, you can download your friends' Facebook photo albums. You can also quickly upload a photo to Facebook, view and edit comments on it, and so on. … Read more

Get an iPhone battery pack for $8.99

This shouldn't come as news to anyone: As iPhones age, their batteries wear out. It's just the unfortunate nature of rechargeable power cells.

Sadly, Apple makes it pretty difficult to swap in a new battery--not without some warranty-voiding surgery, anyway. But you can connect an external power supply, which is cheap, easy, and affordable.

In fact, it's more affordable today than I've ever seen: Meritline has an 1800mAh iPhone backup battery for $8.99 shipped. It's compatible with all iPhone models (the iPhone 4 isn't specifically mentioned, but it stands to reason the battery … Read more