If you wear Zegna suits, have a home in the Hamptons, and if your other car is a Ferrari, then a plastic casing on your portable hard drive would be nothing short of gauche. It’s for you that the brinell purestorage line was created…

With the brinell purestorage product series, brinell, the Karlsruhe-based creative designer, has put portable hard drives on the market, setting new standards in the area of IT peripherals. Not only do these units rank among the most compact USB hard drives in cheque card and pocket format with a capacity of up to 500 GB, they also have an eye-catching housing, made completely of exclusive, high-quality materials such as stainless steel, exotic wood, nappa leather or carbon”

Continue Reading

Speck makes a number of products designed to protect your mobile valuables.  We here at Gear Diary have favorably reviewed several of their cases for iPods and smartphones, including one of my favorites, the CandyShell for iPhone.  Now, Speck introduces protection for your Western Digital Passport and other small portable hard drives.

Continue Reading

Most of us know buying RAM directly from the manufacturer isn’t the most cost effective method.  Many third party suppliers offer RAM upgrades for far less than what you’d pay if you added the additional memory when you first bought the computer.

Other World Computing (OWC) has announced new memory upgrade kits for the just released 21.5″ and 27″ iMacs.

Kits are available up to 16 gig.

Continue Reading

Mini Cooper USB Drive – Special for Mini 50 years old

To celebrate Mini Cooper’s 50th birthday, ZeroBasic will launch a special edition Mini Cooper USB drive at the end of October, with union jack painted, and ‘50′ on the roof. Limited edition of 2000 pcs produced. Memory size ranging from 2GB to 8GB.

Mini is a registered trademark of BMW AG. Licensed by British Motor Heritage Limited. Licensing Agent LMI. Manufacturer: Redismo Fine Products Ltd.

Visit www.cooperusb.com or www.zerobasic.com for more information and products.

Are you in need of extra file storage space? With the release of Windows 7 coming on October 22 many people are going to want to backup their drives before upgrading to the latest Windows version. Here’s a pretty good deal on a 500GB USB 2.0 drive (self-powered via USB port) that should be big enough to hold all but the largest drives.

This portable usb hard drive is an easy, reliable way to add more storage to your PC. Simply plug it in to a USB port and start saving or backing up your photos, music, video and other files. This 500 GB drive comes with a USB 2.0 interface which does not require any power adapter as it is powered directly through the USB cable. Moreover, this preformatted external hard drive is designed for use with windows based computers.

Dell via GearSponsor Logicbuy

For $36 you get not only a comb but a 2GB USB storage drive. Who’d want one of these – and more important why? Which brings me to my main question about this item. Is there any good reason for turning a comb into a combination USB drive and hair care tool? Now if you could plug the comb into the USB port, have it heat, and then use it as a pseudo curling iron. Then you’d have something.

2GB USB Comb via Raw Feed

My review of the ioSafe external hard drive was probably the most fun I’ve had here at Gear Diary.  The product’s performance made a lot of us at Gear Diary say “wow.”

Now the company’s CEO has made me say “wow” again.

An August 30th fire near Highway 49 in Auburn California caused ioSafe’s CEO, Rob Moore  to take notice, mostly because his home was very close to it.  63 homes were destroyed in the blaze the covered more than 340 acres, and although Moore’s house, which was just 1/4 mile from the flames, was spared, he and his family were forced to evacuate the area.

Now ioSafe is giving back.  The company which makes the world’s first water and fire resistant external drive has offered to donate a brand new ioSafe drive to each of the victims of the 49 fire.

Moore says “if people can protect themselves before a disaster, this is an easy way to protect things that insurance can’t get back for you.”

You can read more about the company’s plan to help here.

Wow!  What an awesome time!!  Its time to announce the winner to the ioSafe Slogan Contest, and I am happy to announce that we do have a winner to one of the most successful contests ever run here on Gear Diary!

After a great deal of consideration to over the 100 responses (some with MULTIPLE entries), I am pleased to announce the winning slogan to the ioSafe 500GB External Hard Drive Slogan Contest:

Its not safe unless its ioSafe

The writer of the slogan, uzziah0, has been contacted earlier tonight, AND he quickly responded to our e-mail with his shipping address.

Honorable mention was awarded to the following two slogans:

Hardware for a Hard World
The Harderdrive

Uzziah0, your shipping info has been passed to ioSafe, and you should receive your prize shortly.

If you’re interested in other chances to win safe storage solutions from ioSafe, you should check out their Facebook Fan page; and stay tuned to Gear Diary for other, cool contests coming up in the next couple of weeks!  We have some awesome give-aways planned for this fall!!

If you haven’t written a slogan for our ioSafe USB Hard Drive contest, then you need to stop, check out Larry’s truly awesome video review, and then head over to the contest page and write a slogan for ioSafe.  The contest ends shortly after midnight tonight, Central Time. (Entries logged after midnight Central Time will not be considered.)

Again, the winner will receive a 500GB ioSafe with 3 year warranty and 1 year of data recovery.

The winner be announced here on Gear Diary on Friday, 25-Sep-09 : we’ll post when the email has been sent out, and the winner will have 24 hours to respond and claim their prize.  If the winner doesn’t respond in that time frame, a new winner will be chosen.

Again, decisions of the judges are final. Enter as often as you like (but HURRY)! If there are taxes, VAT/duty, etc., they will be the responsibility of the winner.

Backing up your data is important. Those of us with data loss problems will tell you, having a backup, and even a backup of your backup, can sometimes be the difference between having your wedding pictures and sleeping on the couch. When you’re on the wrong side of this situation, life can be very difficult.

Gear Diary recently ran an AWESOME streaming video review on a nearly indestructible backup device from ioSafe. We were so impressed with the drive, that when they offered to sponsor a contest on Gear Diary we couldn’t wait to take them up on it.

Now, you can win your very own ioSafe!

Continue Reading

Some of the biggest challenges with technology and the gear we decide to regularly use is what problem(s) does it solve?  Will it improve my efficiency? Is it cost effective?   Take the challenge of wireless printing, backing up data from multiple computers, and then sharing that data across your network.

This used to require separate pieces of equipment and the frustration time to manually configure each separate item on your network.   As is usually the case with new products, convergence is the name of the game (and Gear Diary loves convergence!).  Let’s take a look at the new Belkin Home Base, which aims to let anyone with an existing wireless network easily print, backup files, and share their data to anyone on their network.

Continue Reading

I recently posted about my love/hate relationship with the Nokia E71x. It’s gotten a bit more contentious lately, due to various and mysterious software issues. Calendar entries that refuse to accept date changes, programs that freeze repeatedly, games that malfunction…it has been frustrating to say the least.

Cue Nokia PC Suite and their backup suite. My first thought was that perhaps a backup and then full restore might smooth out the quirks, plus it would provide an excellent test of the backup system. If that did not fix my issues, I could reset the phone, rebuild it, and then back up my “clean” setup. I’ve done this before on Windows Mobile phones, iPhones and Palm OS devices and have never had a major issue…until now.

PC Suite backed everything up without a hitch. I followed the convoluted hard reset instructions, looked up the code to authorize the reset, and the phone was wiped. I plugged it back in, started up PC Suite, and set up a restore from my backup; it threw out that an error occurred, but the log didn’t list anything. And now roughly 1/3 of my programs are MIA, mail for exchange isn’t working, and I have no idea what else has/has not carried over. Easily the most disastrous backup I’ve ever used.

Any thoughts from the Symbian experts out there? I’m about to drop  kick my phone across the room, so any tips or calming words would be helpful. And let this serve as a warning to anyone else…make sure you carefully investigate any backup system before you attempt anything drastic, and keep careful records of important data in case something goes awry!

ioSafe, the external hard drive that I had the pleasure of burning to a crisp, is running a rebate.

Yours won’t come charred though, like the one seen above.

In case you missed the full action video you can view it here.

From now until September 15th, you can save $50 off the price of a 1.5 TB ioSafe Solo.

You can learn more about the rebate and see the entire line of ioSafe products by visiting the ioSafe web site.

Yeah.  I know what you’re thinking?  Flash and Silverlight on a BlackBerry Web Browser?!? First, there was news that RIM was working on a browser that could render a website correctly beat the iPhone.  Today, BoyGenius has reported that RIM is “planning on integrating full Flash and Microsoft Silverlight support into their BlackBerry Web Browser.”

Don’t get too excited just yet.  RIM has to begin producing devices that can handle HSPA and LTE data speed — not to mention that wireless carriers  still have to get their data network infrastructure upgraded.  So, as exciting as it could be — it’s still going to be a long, painful wait.

Via BGR

I continue to be amazed by how much storage hard drive manufacturers cram into an extremely small space.  Not long ago, I looked at the MoreSpace drive, and was blown away by its full terabyte of storage.  So, you can imagine my delight when only a few months later, I was offered the chance to review a drive which uses half the space on my desk, but features double the storage…and it comes from Seagate, whom I already love.  The Seagate Freeagent Xtreme features a massive 2 terabytes of storage.  I think we are going to need a closer look at this one.

Continue Reading