Seagate ST650211USB

Flash memory-based storage (provided by USB thumb drives) is quickly growing in popularity due to rapidly falling prices, but the cost per gigabyte of flash-based storage is still nowhere near as good as pocket-sized hard drives. Don’t believe us? Seagate’s ST625211USB and ST650211USB are perfect examples.

Seagates 5GB mini-wonder

These pocket hard drives utilize your computers USB 2.0 interface, just like a USB thumb drive, and if you’re a Windows XP/2000/ME user, don’t require a driver for use. Simply plug the drive into your system’s USB port, and the system recognizes it instantly!

The beauty of all this isn’t just the convenience though, the price is also pretty remarkable. Street prices for the 5.0GB ST650211USB hover in the $130-$160 price range.
The ST650211USB is pretty durable. The 1” drive itself features Seagate’s G-Force technology, which has been used on their high-end Cheetah line for years. Meanwhile, the USB cable itself can be neatly tucked away within the ST650211USB’s plastic enclosure. Seagate even decks the unit out with a blue LED on the top of the enclosure to indicate disk activity.

USB cable winds around entire chassis

Tucking it back in

Everything is flush now

The specs on the ST650211USB ST1 hard drive are pretty impressive for a 1” drive. It features a 2MB buffer and spins at 3600 RPMs. According to Seagate, the ST650211USB is just 2.7 inches in diameter and weighs in at 2.3 ounces. Seagate also ships the drive with a CD which contains drivers for older operating systems as well as the drive toolkit, which can be used to setup partitions on the disk, to write protect the disk, or to make it bootable. All in all this is a pretty impressive package, especially for audio/video enthusiasts or anyone else who needs a large amount of storage in a very small space. The affordable price tag is only icing on the cake.

Shuttle CR40

After successfully launching their XP17 flat panel display, Shuttle is now expanding into another market: DVD burning. Their CR40 is a dual-layer DVD burner offering 16X DVD write speeds for DVD+/-R and rewrite (as well as dual-layer) speeds of 4X.

Shuttle CR40 dual-layer DVD burning

Those of you with white small form factor systems such as Shuttle’s ST62K Zen XPC, or the AOpen XC Cube will be glad to hear that the CR40 is available in white, blending in perfectly with the chassis of one of these systems. Shuttle also offers black and silver as color options as well. Drives in these two colors even sport a brushed aluminum bezel!

It’s styling changes like this that set the CR40 apart from conventional DVD burners. The drive sports a minimalist design, with smooth corners rather than the sharp edges you see on most drives, as well as an elongated eject button. The only feature that’s really missing is Serial ATA support.

Shuttle markets these drives as XPC accessories, as the drives colors match those of Shuttle’s XPC line, but they’ll work just fine with more conventional desktop PCs. Those of you with aluminum cases may want to look into picking up a silver CR40 sometime soon. It’s these unique colors that really allow the CR40 to stand out from the competition in our opinion.