Fujitsu claims that their latest 2.5-inch HandyDrive, an external hard disk drive is the World’s highest capacity. This 220 grams, 500GB monster, with password lock tool security and the ability to save 35% of power in standby mode is  approximately £181.

The drive has a distinctive internal shock-endurance mechanism that helps reduce the effect of impact and lends increased data protection.

Fujitsu will also release 160GB, 250GB, 320GB and 400GB versions of their HandyDrive.

Super Talent Technology, a leading manufacturer of Flash storage solutions and DRAM memory modules unveiled their PICO-C Gold USB drive.

Weighing only 4.7 grams, Super Talent claims that the 24-carat gold-plated, water resistant and shock resistant USB drive with a profile smaller than the traditional SD memory card is the world’s smallest.

The card uses chip-on-board (COB) technology to squeeze 8GB of Flash  in an area that is less than 1.2 inches wide and less than half an inch long (31.3mm x 12.4mm x 3.4mm).The transfer speed of the PICO-C Gold is 30MB/sec.

“Is it the speed, the ruggedness, the water resistance, the incredibly tiny size or the pure elegance that people like most in our Pico-C drive? Who knows? But, this combination of features and style is not offered in any other terrestrial storage device, which makes it a real craze”, commented Super Talent Marketing Director, Joe James.

The  PICO-C Gold 8GB USB drive is backed with a lifetime warranty and is now available under $40.

While today’s hard drives have reached and surpassed the 1 Terabyte storage capacity, many businesses with tremendous amount of data to store are still relying on tape as their primary archiving medium.  The good news for these businesses is that Sun Microsystems has unveiled their 1 Terabyte capacity tapes where they can store their priceless data.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. again raised the bar on the storage industry with the release of the industry’s first one terabyte tape storage drives.

The Sun StorageTek T10000B Fibre Channel tape drive is the first tape drive to reach 1TB capacity. The Storage Tek T10000B drive uses a new formatting technique that lets it achieve more density than the previous models.

Hitachi announced their latest 2nd generation 1 Terabyte HDD, the Deskstar 7K1000.B, which claims to be the most energy efficient 1TB 7,200 RPM hard drive in the world.

The drive’s main feature is the use of three platters which can store up to 374GB of data each. With only three platters, the drive’s  idle power consumption is reduced up to 43% compared to Hitachi’s first generation 1TB HDD. The 7K1000.B also offers users the option of bulk data encryption (BDE) for the entire contents of the drive.

Below are the drive’s few specs:

•  7,200 rpm
• 1TB capacity
• 3 Gb/s SATA interface
• 32 MB buffer
• 1.2 million hours Mean Time Between Failure
• Rotational Vibration Safeguard

Seagate announced their 1.5 Terabyte, 3.5-inch version of the Barracuda 7200.11. The drive’s storage capacity which is 500GB more than any 3.5-inch desktop hard drive, is accomplished through refinement of perpendicular recording that allows 375GB of data to fit on each of the drive’s four platters.

The drive’s fast Serial ATA II interface delivers an industry-leading sustained data rate of up to 120MB/second for fast boot, application startup and file access. The 3.5-inch drive is also offered in capacities of 1TB, 750GB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB and 160GB with cache options of 32MB and 16MB.

Seagate also developed a new unit, a 500GB, 2.5-inch laptop drive under their Momentus line of drives in both 5400RPM and 7200RPM flavors with 16MB of cache.

Good news to all SSD technology fans, Samsung announced today that they have started mass producing 1.8-Inch & 2.5-Inch MLC-based Solid State Drives in 64GB and 128GB versions. These SATA II SSDs provide a reading speed of 90MB/s, writing speed of 70MB/s and power consumption of 0.2-watts in idle state and 0.5-watts in active state.

The 128GB MLC-based SSD consists of 64 MLC NAND flash memory chips of 16 gigabits each, optimized single-chip controller technology and advanced flash-management firmware technology. Enclosed in a brushed metallic casing, it measures 100mm x 69.8mm and is only 9.5mm thick.

Samsung plans to produce 256GB SSDs by the end of this year.