Portable hard disk drives (HDD) are no longer something only the road warrior is interested in. Most consumers have a growing digital archive of work documents, images, videos and texts they need to manage while on the move.

For portability, Western Digital have shrunk their external portable HHDs to a compact, convenient size. There is no need to carry around a charger as the WD Passport portable HDD are powered by a USB 2.0 cable connection. As it will be a personal accessory, WD have given the Passport a stylish rounded corner shape which is available in black, white, metallic red, green and metallic pink. A good range of HDD capacities from 60GB to 320GB are available. The WD Passport’s Scorpio SATA HDD drive spins at a healthy 5400RMP for quick data retrieval.
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Home servers are a growing segment of the consumer electronics market - although lagging behind the rate at which home digital assets are growing. Market research firm, In-Stat, recently released a report predicting a 62% growth rate for home network media servers from 2006 to 2011. In reality, it is something that needs to happen if families are to secure their rapidly growing digital assets including music, images and videos.

The core capabilities of the 500GB LaCie Ethernet Disk Mini Home Edition Server are;

• Central storage for sharing, synchronizing and showing your digital media assets with friends and family
• Accessibility home files from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection
• Playback videos, music and photos on your television (UPnP capable)

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MediaFire is a free, unlimited online storage site for sharing files and images. PC Magazine included it in their last Top 100 New Sites list.

MediaFire list the main features of their online file and image storage service as:

• Files and image sharing with friends or colleagues;
• Unlimited file (up to 100MB in size) uploading;
• Use of folders to share groups of files or create image galleries;
• Registration is voluntary with all features available if you are registered or not;
• No software needs to be installed on your PC;
• Easy access from any Internet connected computer to your files stored online.
• Links to files can be created from your MySpace page, your blog, or forums (this can be a big bandwidth and dollar saving for your website)

MediaFire provides privacy tools for keeping some files hidden as private and other files visible (in public) and downloadable. Passwords can be set for individual, sensitive files.

Overall MediaFire is a flexible and adaptable free file hosting system well worth investigating.

Now that Blu-ray has won the high definition DVD format battle, consumers will feel more confident about opting to purchase a media server to manage the ballooning storage requirements of their digital assets. A premium solution available is Sony’s HES-V1000 home entertainment media server and 200 disc BD/DVD/CD changer.

The HES-V1000 is a small, black tower (31 5/8 inches or 803 mm) stacked with a 500GB hard drive and room for 200 discs from your collection (actually you would have a very impressive collection just to fill it). The HDD can store up to 137 hours of video, 40,000 music files or 20,000 digital images. To access your media files Sony have included their Emmy award winning Xcross Media Bar (XMB) user interface as well as All-Media Guide (AMG) metadata technology.
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Epson’s P-5000 and P-3000 are designed to be portable, durable and efficient digital multimedia storage solutions. The P-5000 Multimedia Storage Viewer won “Best Storage Backup in Europe 2007” from the Technical Imaging Press Association (TIPA) award as well as an iF Product Design award at the CeBit exhibition in Hannover. The on-screen interface has three viewing modes for users to quickly organize files, create albums and slideshows and assign file ratings for personal access preferences. Each has a 4 inch, 640×480 resolution, 4-colour filter system LCD screen.

The LCD screen is based on Epson’s new Photo Fine Ultra technology which has the world’s first four-color filter system of red, blue, emerald green and yellow green – an improvement over the standard three-color LCD technology. So, each pixel uses four sub-pixel colors to create required colors (as an artist mixes different colored paints) enabling a greater range of colors (gamut) to be reproduced. The P-5000 and P3000 are also the World’s first portable players to support the xvYCC video color space
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The Maxtor OneTouch 4 is squarely aimed at PC or Mac home users who realize that they need an effective, safe storage solution for their digital memories. The OneTouch is available in three sizes; 750GB, 500GB and 250GB. Maxtor quote the 750GB version as being capable of storing 240, 000 digital images or 750 hours of video or 12,495 hours of music.

As well as functioning as an external hard drive (HDD), the Maxtor OneTouch 4 can also act as a networked media center as a backup for all digital media files from a home network. Maxtor provide two levels of security to protect from unauthorized access; Maxtor DrivePass and encryption.
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Iomega’s latest models in their eGo range of portable hard drives (HDD), the 160GB and 250GB offer more capacity and dual USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 interfaces for PC and Mac connectivity. Iomega’s eGo was one of TIME magazine’s “Top 10 Gadgets” of 2007. Not only is the eGo functional, it also has a funky curved chassis (Cherry Red, Midnight Blue or Jet Black) with chrome endcaps.

The 2.5 inch eGo Drive lets you store all those personal and business files you need to carry with you in a stylish, compact unit which can be tucked away in a briefcase or purse. With 250GB capacity the eGo can carry up to 4,600 hours of music, 1 million photos or 375 hours of video - a lot of data to recovery if you haven’t been backing up. If you are using the USB port there is no need for a separate power supply.
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Most consumers are becoming aware, sometimes tragically, that they need an effective storage solution for their important digital media files including photos, videos and music. Higher photo and video resolutions are pushing the demand for even higher capacity storage solutions.

Iomega have obviously identified the trend as they offer the high capacity ScreenPlay Multimedia Drive (500GB and 360GB) – a much less expensive solution than a media server. The drives are compatible with a wide range of current multimedia formats including MP3, AC3 (Dolby® Digital Encoding), WAV, MPEG-1; MPEG-2 (AVI/VOB); MPEG-4 (AVI/DiVX 3.11, 4.x, 5.x/XViD) and JPEG.
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Alienware’s High Definition (1080p eg. Blu-ray Disc) Media Server packs a large 4TB (4,000 Gb) of memory for central storage for all types of digital content (eg. movies, music and images) for wireless streaming and sharing with home entertainment systems and other compatible media devices.

Storage is provided by four hard drives which are hot swappable (front panel access) and in a standard RAID 5 configuration. Upgrading or swapping hard disc drives is a simple matter of pulling one drive out and pushing another in. The Alienware HD server handles all the configuration work automatically.
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