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! Continue reading Western Digital adds digital labels to My Book external drives
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