Western Digital has just started what I believe will be the next trend in USB drives: a small piece of “e-paper” that can be used to label the drive. The main advantage of using the “e-label”, as they call it, is that it’s based on the electronic ink technology developed for e-readers. This means the label can be changed as often as needed just like a “traditional” LCD or LED display, but it will also stay readable when the drive is powered off.
I can see many other uses for this, but the most important one is for tape drives. Can you imagine a tape drive that uses cartridges with e-labels? Instead of using barcodes or writing your own labels, the tape unit can update the label automatically so that your tape cartridges always display the contents and date of the last backup on the cartridge. Here’s my vote for including this as a mandatory item in the next LTO standard!
Getting back to the Western Digital drives, there are currently two models that incorporate this new technology. Both come with WD SmartWare, a piece of software that can be used as a backup tool, but which has gained the additional feature of being able to update the label on the front of the drives. The first new drive is the updated My Book Elite; it comes in 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB sizes. It’s preformatted as NTFS, and has a USB 2.0 connection.
Western Digital My Book Elite
The My Book Studio is targeted at media professionals that use a Mac:
“Photographers, videographers and other Mac computer enthusiasts require fast performance for their complex projects,” said Dale Pistilli, vice president of marketing for WD’s branded products group. “They also have a very large number of projects and files which they need to keep organized across multiple hard drives. With a FireWire 800 interface and customizable e-label, the new My Book Studio drives offer an elegant, high-speed solution for these creative professionals to interact with, organize and securely archive their media.”
The main difference is the additional FireWire 800 interface, and the fact that it’s formatted for MacOS instead of NTFS. The available sizes are the same as the Elite model, with the addition of a smaller 500GB unit.
Western Digital My Book Studio backside: USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 ports.
MSRP for the Studio model is between $149.99 and $299.99, depending on the size; the Elite model is expexted to sell for between $169.99 and $279.99.
Related posts:
Your RSS reader
Daily e-mail
Twitter
