Hasta La Gadget!

HP must have thought it could sneak this one by us — and it would have succeeded too, if it wasn’t for those meddling tipsters. A close examination of the recently announced EliteBook 8560w’s press shot reveals it has a CFast slot, an interesting tidbit not mentioned in the release or the spec sheet. This is, to our knowledge, the first notebook to ship with a slot for the updated CompactFlash format, though the lack of cameras and other devices using the medium makes it a somewhat superfluous feature at the moment. Still, with transfer rates significantly faster than current CompactFlash cards and twice that of SDXC cards (with room to grow), we assume its only a matter of time before Nikon and Canon slap these bad boys in a few high-end shooters. Closeup shot after the break.

[Thanks, Reznov]

Continue reading HP tries to sneak CFast slot by us in EliteBook 8560w

HP tries to sneak CFast slot by us in EliteBook 8560w originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 15 Apr 2011 21:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Inside an old 4GB PATA hard drive. Photo Walknboston / Flickr

If you yank one of Toshiba’s new Self Erasing Drives from a computer and try to use it in another machine, then it can instantly wipe sensitive data, leaving a thief with little more than an empty chunk of glass and silicon.

The SED performs a cryptographic erase on itself. Unlike a regular erase which overwrites data several times to obliterate it, a crypto erase actually just nukes the crypto keys. Data on the dive is encrypted using a 256-bit AES algorithm, and is unencrypted on the fly during normal use. Once the drive detects that it isn’t in its usual machine, it destroys its keys, making the data impossible to decipher.

This is the same tech used in smartphones to perform remote wipes.

The SED can be configured in several ways. The first I have described above. The user can also choose to have certain sections erased on every reboot, have part or all of the drive zapped if an unauthorized host tries to connect, or wipe the drive after x incorrect password attempts.

The drives will come in sizes up to 640GB, and will be ideal for laptop use, or in machines to which many people have physical access. The next version of OS X — 10.7 Lion — should have something similar, but having it built into the drive itself seems like the best idea of all, especially if you travel to and from the U.S and don’t trust the border guards (hint: never trust border guards).

MKxx61GSYG Series Hard Disk Drive [Toshiba via Computer world]

See Also:

• Padlock Encrypted Hard Drive Secures Data With Keypad
• Review: Rugged Hard Drive Serves to Protect Your Digital Booty …

Digging through our drawers here at Engadget there is one thing we’re clearly not in desperate need of: USB flash drives. We also happen to have a plethora of microSD cards in 1GB an 2GB sizes, left over from the days when picking a smartphone meant Windows Mobile or BlackBerry. This concept USB drive, dubbed The Collector, could potentially solve our conundrum by allowing us to toss all those thumb drives and find a use for our now homeless microSD chips. The Collector wouldn’t have any storage of its own, instead you’d slip up to three microSD cards into it and, when full, simply swap them out for more. It would also combine your smaller chunks of storage into a single block, so those three 2GB scraps would become a slightly less useless 6GB drive. Of course, keeping that pile of microSD cards (now bound by common data) organized might actually be a bigger headache than rifling through your drawers looking for that OFWGKTA mixtape you downloaded so many months ago.

The Collector concept turns unused microSD cards into a refillable thumb drive originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 12 Apr 2011 13:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Thunderbolt goodness just keeps on rolling out at NAB. G-Technology just announced it will be adding support for the high-speed connection to its line of RAID devices for those who spend their days chopping up HD video. The first batch of products will hit in either Q3 or Q4 and start with the company’s smaller arrays in the four to eight-disc size. A prototype of a four-drive model can be seen in the photo above, which rep Pete Schlatter described to us as “the sweet spot” in terms of portability and storage. Sure, calling an eight drive array “portable” sounds like a stretch, but don’t forget: these are designed to be paired with laptops and carried by people editing video on the go — you know, guys with giant cases of equipment and biceps to match.

G-Technology crashes NAB with portable, Thunderbolt-equipped RAID arrays originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 12 Apr 2011 01:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Many of us have a smartphone, set-top box, and a PC or two, and it’s always nice (and sometimes necessary) to have access to your data no matter which gadget you’ve got on hand. Enter D-Link’s newest ShareCenter NAS servers, the DNS-320 and DNS-325 to accomplish the task of digital distribution. Both pack dual SATA 3.5-inch drive bays for up to 4TB of total storage, a single USB 2.0 port, RAID support, integrated P2P, gigabit Ethernet, and a built in web file-server app (too bad they didn’t follow QNAP’s lead and give us a dedicated smartphone app as well). Available now, the $110 DNS-320’s got an 800MHz processor and 128MB of RAM, while those willing to pony up $200 for the DNS-325 get 1.2GHz silicon, 256MB of memory, photo gallery and audio streaming apps, plus the ability to host your blog directly from the device. If you want a 1TB drive pre-installed, prices jump to $200 for the DNS-320 and $280 for the DNS-325 when they drop next month. A small price to pay in preparation for World Backup Day, wouldn’t you say?

Continue reading D-Link does the NAS dance with new ShareCenter DNS-320 and DNS-325 home servers

D-Link does the NAS dance with new ShareCenter DNS-320 and DNS-325 home servers originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 08 Apr 2011 12:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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