How can hard-drive companies jump on the iPad bandwagon? Seagate and Hitachi have created wireless drives designed to work with Apple’s tablet. Iomega is taking another approach. Its Mac Companion Hard Drive is a standard USB hard disk–and a desktop model at that–designed to charge an iPad.

As seen above, the Companion features an Apple-esque design and is sized to fit on the stand of an iMac or Apple monitor. It can connect to a Mac via FireWire 400/800 or USB 2.0, and has both a two-port USB 2.0 hub and the high-powered charging port required by the iPad.  (The USB 2.0 is a tipoff that Iomega really intends this drive for Mac users–otherwise, the company has been aggressively moving to USB 3.0, a technology which no Mac yet supports.)

The Companion is available in 1TB ($195) and 2TB ($295) versions, carries a three-year warranty, and will be available only at the Apple Store at first.

David Spark (@dspark) is a veteran tech journalist and the founder of the media consulting and production company Spark Media Solutions.  Spark blogs regularly at Spark Minute.

This article is Part II of a two-part series about how to record, encode, store, organize, and share via online and DVD a video of each day of your child’s life. The first part, over at Spark Minute, covers the basics of doing the recording and storing the video. This article covers the second part, which is the daunting process of organizing and sharing the videos.

A year ago I decided to take on a seemingly gargantuan task.

I began shooting a video of my son every single day of the first year of his life. As of today I’ve shot (with the help of my wife), produced, shared online, and printed on DVD over 400 one-minute videos (some days I produce more than one video).

When I tell people I’m doing this they can’t believe it, because they immediately think of how much work it must involve. But in actuality, given the tools we have, the cost of disk space, and just some good pre-planning and organizing (the most critical parts), it’s really not that difficult. You just have to commit to it, and do it. The trick is to not make it too difficult on yourself, so you can do it easily without it being a burden. If it’s too hard, you’ll just give up.

No matter how busy you are, there is a way to record  a video every day of your child’s life, and manage all that video. Just think how amazing it would be if your parents had recorded a video a day of you (heck, a video a year). Wouldn’t that be incredible? I’m hoping it’ll be the same for my son.

Continue reading this story…

Online backup kingpin Mozy built its business in part on an appealing, cheap-sounding offer: You could back up as much data to the cloud as you wanted for $4.99 a month. On Monday, it announced plans to move to new pricing plans that involve both higher prices and fixed storage limits. But depending on how you use the service, the revised options could cost you a little more or a lot more–or might save you money.

Now there are two MozyHome plans: You can pay $5.99 a month for up to 50GB of backup space for one PC, or $9.99 a month for up to 125GB of space for three PCs. (In both cases, there are discounts if you sign up for a year or two years at a time.) You can add additional computers and/or extra 20GB blocks of storage for $2 a month apiece. For new customers, the pricing takes effect immediately; existing ones get keep the old prices until March 1st, and those who bought service in chunks of a year or more won’t see an increase until their current block of time runs out.

For most Mozy customers, the new pricing works out to a price hike of a buck a month, or twenty percent. For a minority of users who backed up immense amounts of data, it’ll be an increase so huge as to make the service unaffordable, which may be the idea. (Storing a terabyte of data–which some people did–will now cost almost $100 a month.) For anyone who wants to use Mozy with three PCs and can make do with a total of 125GB of space, however, the new pricing is a third cheaper than the old “unlimited” plan, since it would have required three separate $4.99 plans.

Continue reading this story…

IoSafe, which makes disaster-proofed storage devices, may not have the biggest booth at CES–or, come to think of it, any booth at all–but it consistently comes up with unique, memorable demos of its products. Last year it set fire to a drive, drowned it, then drove over it with a steamshovel. This year, it took one of its new Rugged Portable drives–available with both aluminum and titanium cases–and dunked it in a fish tank, squeezed it a vice, and then turned it into a shooting-range target. And after a few minutes’ work with a screwdriver–the external USB connector had been damaged–all the data on the SSD inside was proven to be safe and sound.

I’m not sure what the company has planned for CES 2012, but I wonder if it would be okay to drop a drive from the top of the Stratosphere?

Photos after the jump (that’s IoSafe founder Robb Moore doing most of the damage, and me turning the screw on the vice).

Continue reading this story…

Venerable storage company Iomega has made its CES announcements. They include a unique new iPhone/iPod Touch dock, two TV boxes that are the first ones to run the Boxee software since D-Link’s original Boxee Box, and Web-enabled updates to its network storage products.

Waitaminnit–what is a storage company like Iomega doing making an iPhone dock? Well, its new SuperHero is a storage device: The $69.99 gizmo packs a 4GB SD card. And when you use it with Iomega’s iPhone app, it’ll back up your contacts and photos as you charge your phone. (If you’ve got more than 4GB of stuff, you can swap out the included SD card and insert one of your own.) If you lose your data–or lose your phone, period, and get a new one–you can use the Iomega app to restore the data.

Continue reading this story…

Last Gadget Standing nominee: Newer Technology Guardian MAXimus Mini

Price: starts at $229.99

Newer Technology’s Guardian MAXimus Mini is an external RAID (0 and 1) storage systen that protects your data by writing it to two drives. Nothing particularly noteworthy about that. But as the “Mini” in its name suggests, it’s small–really small, as you can see by the photo to the right. It also draws its power from its USB FireWire connection, making it truly mobile. It’s meant for Mac users but can be reformatted to work with any OS.

The MAXimus holds two 2.5 drives; a version with two 5400rpm 500GB disks costs $229.99, and there are higher capacity and 7200rpm options. But I’m fascinated by its highest-end versions, which use solid-state disks instead of spinning platters. A model with two 400GB SSDs costs $3299.99. I won’t be buying it, but I think it’s kind of neat it exists. (And I wonder how long it’ll be until falling flash prices make it affordable.)

Can we all agree that Apple will be the first major computer manufacturer to stop using hard drives? I assume so, anyhow–although I’m still trying to figure out just when it’ll happen.

Apple’s big press event yesterday previewed OS X, introduced iLife ’11 and two new MacBook Air models, and provided lots to chew on–including decisions on Apple’s part that are bound to be controversial. I’m working on some stories about the news (including a hands-on look at the 11.6″ MacBook Air) but in the meantime I’m interested in what you think. So here’s a T-Poll extravaganza with five questions for you.

Continue reading this story…

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler says he’s never once used the DVD burner on his MacBook Pro and is therefore excited about the possibility of a superlight, driveless MacBook Air. I keep going back and forth on whether optical drives are superfluous yet: They’re still occasionally handy for installing software, and I still use them to watch movies (or just rip them into a form I can watch on any device). I figure that three years from now, they’ll be quite unusual–but I could be wrong, since I would have guessed three years ago that they’d be almost extinct by late 2010…

An IBM data center in North Carolina

How is IBM funneling its vast resources into research around future products and services? At a press and analyst day last week in New York City, the company talked up projects around replacing today’s flash-based SSDs (solid state drives) with new PCM (phase change memory) technology and dropping DVRs (digital video recorders) in favor of video storage clouds.

IBM is about to start field tests with cable TV companies around new cloud-based video storage services for consumers, said Steve Canepa, general manager for IBM’s Global Media & Entertainment Industry Division.

Meanwhile, for businesses, Big Blue is eyeing the release in another four years of new storage servers based on PCM, according to other speakers at the press event on Thursday in midtown Manhattan.

Continue reading this story…

Someone stole John Boldt’s laptop out of the trunk of his car. Nothing really newsworthy about that. But according to a CTV Calgary article, that laptop contained the University of Calgary grad student’s nearly-completed master’s thesis, as well as his research and notes.

“It’s so many years of my life just thrown away,” Boldt told CTV. “The computer can be replaced. It’s what’s on it that can’t.” Unless an honest thief returns the precious files, Boldt figures that he can’t return to the University. His academic life and future career, judging from the article, are pretty much over.

Continue reading this story…

Do you own a computer with USB 3.0 ports? Probably not. You will, though–and when you do, you’ll want USB 3.0 devices so you can take advantage of the sizable speed boost.

USB 3.0-equipped peripherals, like USB 3.0 PCs, remain somewhat exotic. But here’s some good news: Iomega is announcing that it’s going to replace all its current USB 2.1 portable hard drives with USB 3.0 models. The transition starts with new versions of the company’s 500GB and 1TB eGo drives, due in October. It says its other models will follow suit, starting in the first quarter of next year.

Iomega isn’t announcing how much the USB 3.0 drives will cost, because it’s not sure what the going rate for portable drives will be in October. But it is saying that you won’t pay a premium for the USB 3.0 models over 2.0 versions. (It currently charges $114.99 for a 500GB eGo and $189.99 for a 1TB one.) The new versions will come with AES 256 hardware encryption standard, and are rated to survive a seven-foot drop–twice the industry average, Iomega says,

USB 3.0 drives work fine with USB 2.1 ports–at 2.1 speeds–so there’s no reason not to buy a USB 3.0 drive, even if you can’t take advantage of its speed just yet.

USB 3.0 portable drives aren’t new, but they’ve been nichey products at a premium price; Iomega’s move to replace 2.1 models with 3.0 ones at similar price points is a welcome development. If Iomega can afford to make USB 3.0 standard, it seems like a good bet that Seagate (which currently sells USB 2.1 drives that can be upgraded to 3.0) and Western Digital will do the same before too many months pass.

Today’s the last chance to get a shot at one of the five Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Pro hard drives we’re giving away. Here’s how to enter.

Our Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Pro giveway continues–go here to enter.

On Tuesday evening in San Francisco, we threw a party we called SpringThing at a cool art gallery called 12 Gallagher Lane. Our cohost/sponsor was Seagate, which gave demos of its just-announced line of FreeAgent GoFlex external hard drives. The folks in the photo above (by Ken Yeung) all look so attentive because they’re watching the giveaway drawing we did for five GoFlex drives. We can’t recreate the whole nifty SpringThing experience online, but here’s the next best thing: we’re replicate the giveaway drawing.

Continue reading this story…

(Full disclosure: As I blogged last week, Technologizer is throwing a party called SpringThing tonight in San Francisco. Our sponsor is Seagate, who will be demoing the products I discuss here.)

External hard disks are one of the most universally useful gadgets known to techkind. And they’re all pretty similar: For the most part, differences involve the quantity of gigabytes you get for your money, the industrial design of the case, and maybe the software the manufacturer bundles.  But Seagate has come up with an interesting twist for FreeAgent GoFlex, a new update to all the products in its FreeAgent Go line of portable external drives–it’s making the interface part of the cable, rather than part of the drive.

Continue reading this story…