I-O Data is back on the RoHS-compliant NAS trail again, as its new LANDISK Tera offers up a secure, environmentally-friendly way to stash and share your data over a network. The new drive comes in both 1TB and 2TB flavors, supports RAID 5, boasts four hot-swappable bays, and now features AES 256-bit encryption. Additionally, this data cube comes dressed in all black, keeps your data under lock and key, and even touts a secondary security lock that can only be accessed with your chipped USB thumb drive. Aside from touting gigabit Ethernet, you’ll also find support for Windows Active Directory and a data tracking feature to keep watch over who moves your precious files. Both units can be snapped up sometime next month, and while the 1TB variety will run you Â¥99,800 ($846), the 2TB edition will demand Â¥168,000 ($1,424).

[Via Akihabara News]
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Who uses 1.8-inch drives? Why Apple’s 5.5G iPod (among other notables) of course. So if you’re thinking about the next big thing, remember this, Tosh just announced their 100GB, 1.8-inch hard disk drive due for mass production starting January. The new drives use perpendicular storage technology like their other drives and feature a 4,200rpm spin, 15ms seek, 100MBps max transfer rate and improved error correction code.

[Via Impress]
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While it’s fun to watch manufacturers stuff ever-larger hard drives into their ever-sexier NAS products, it gets a bit tried after a while. That’s why we’re excited to see Buffalo mixing things up a bit with some fancy new iTunes sharing. For the most part, Buffalo’s new HS-DHGL “LinkStation Living” lineup sticks to the general HDD bump scheme, with options for 250GB, 320GB and 500GB hard drives (at the respective prices of roughly $287, $306 and $441), but spices things up a bit with DLNA for media pushing, and breaks new ground with iTunes server functionality. We’re not exactly sure if that means these things can serve up iTunes DRM’ed music, or just your standard fare MP3/AAC files, but it’s a welcome addition all the same. We did see that iHome Multi-Center a couple months back that was touting FairPlay compatibility, so we know the former is at least possible. Stir in a bit of gigabit Ethernet and TV recording functionality (over USB and Ethernet, it seems), and it looks like Buffalo has quite the winner here, though it looks like most of this winning will be happing in Japan for now.

[Via Impress]
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Joining Toshiba at the top of the SDHC capacity/speed game is Elecom with this, the world’s second class-4, 8GB SDHC card. Not class-2 son, oh no, this is class-4 so we’re talking a 4MB/s minimum write speed. Elecom claims you’ll see a max transfer rate of 7MB/s when these launch (before Toshiba?) in the first part of January. Fine, but what interests us more is the price: about Â¥39,800 or $343. See Toshiba, it’s not all that hard to provide a price now is it? Now get moving, pressures on to beat Elecom if you want to live up to your “world’s first” claim.

[Via Impress]
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Another day, another NAS. This time it’s NEC bringing the goods, with a relatively small 8.66-inch tall enclosure and a lockable front door. The forthcoming NS50 packs a 600MHz Intel XScale processor, 256MB of RAM, dual LAN ports, and twin USB 2.0 connectors, and plays nice with a slew of Windows and Linux-based operating environments. Per usual, the box connects via gigabit Ethernet and can be managed through a secure web connection as well as remotely, and touts support for Microsoft‘s Active Directory as well. NEC claims the unit can integrate seamlessly as an FTP server or as a “soon to be announced” print server, and can run things in RAID 0/1/5 or JBOD, whichever you please. NEC’s perfectly average NS50 should hit shops next month for £949 ($1,845) if you’re digging the 1TB (4 x 250GB) version, while the 2TB (4 x 500GB) flavor will set you back a whopping £1589 ($3,088).

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It’s a solar cell! It’s a VoIP phone! It’s a USB stick? Convergence isn’t just limited to cellphones and laptops, pallies, we’re already seeing companies try to cram in functions and features to the new ubiquity: USB drives. Enter A-DATA’s as yet unannounced Solar and VoIP Disks. The Solar does as you’d expect, collects power and displays how much storage you’ve got left (although we’re not super hot on the idea of an unstable current pulsing through our flash drive); the VoIP, unlike the Vonage V-Phone, actually provides audio functionality for calling as well.

From engadget

Yet another unannounced device tonight: Spark Technology’s SwizzleStik (no c, damn you), a USB drive intended to make phone data management simple. We’re assuming that’s on the SIM end of things, but it’s supposedly able to sync more than just your contacts, like your ringtones, music and photos. If this thing is just a microSD to USB adapter, we’re gonna have to have a little talk with Spark.

From engadget