The 4TB hard drives will be part of Hitachi’s G-RAID and G-DRIVE lineup of external drives. Their perforated, all-aluminum cases look pretty nice. Matching the look of the Mac Pro tower, these drives are clearly targeted at Apple users. All models will come with Thunderbolt support, while PC users will have to be content with eSATA and USB 2.0 (sorry, no USB 3.0).

The drives will start shipping in October. Other hard drive makers will certainly release their own 4TB drives in the near future as well.

The SDCard HxC Floppy Emulator can replace just about any old 34-pin floppy drive, allowing older computers and electronic gear to read data from a modern SD card. Designed by Jean-François DEL NERO, the HxC Floppy Emulator has been tested to work with PC, Atari ST, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Thomson, MSX, ZX Spectrum series computers among others, and they continue to add support for more devices like synthesizers and samplers. It just plugs in where the device’s old floppy drive once sat, allowing you to read up to 2GB from and SD or 32GB from an SDHC card. The drive can even emulate two drives at once too.

It even emulates the head stepper motor sound of a 3.5″ floppy drive, as you can hear in the video below:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The HxC SD Floppy Emulator sells for $109.99 (USD) over on eBay.

The Jack Sparrow 16GB USB flash drive was handmade by 123Smile from Germany and is available at his Etsy store. Unfortunately, it sells for $229.95, which is an obscene amount of money for a 16GB flash drive, but at least you get something that was handmade for your money.

If Jack Sparrow doesn’t rock your boat, then you can check out 123smiles’ other wares. He’s got quite a few different custom LEGO USB flash drives.

[via Geek Alerts]

Damn. That’s 128 GB in a box just a bit bigger than a wristwatch. The nano SSD has a maximum write speed of 160 megabytes/sec, and read speed of up to 150 megabytes/sec. To give you a better idea of how nano it is, here’s the full shot, with the SSD compared alongside a 3.5-in HD and a 2.5-in SSD:

InnoDesk also showed that the tiny drive can take a beating too; they setup a motherboard with the nano SSD hooked up to it, and subjected it continuously to 20gs of “accelerative force.”

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

I wasn’t there so I don’t know how InnoDisk proved that their drive survived the test, but apparently it did. Let’s just believe them for now and imagine a future with tiny computers and even tinier PMPs running on nano hardware like this. Mmmmm. The future looks expensive. And tiny.

[via TweakTown]

Man Works Design’s K-95 waterproof USB flash storage device is a concept design in search of an actual need. Still, there’s something I kind of like about the clever submarine-shaped design of these flash drives.

Now all I need is that waterproof laptop to go with these, and I’ll be all set.

[via designeast]

The diminutive 3-door MINI E is powered by a 100% electric motor (hybrids are for wusses), and still manages to go from 0 to 62 mph (100 km/h) in about 8.5 seconds. While a top speed of 95 mph (152 km/h) isn’t going to break any world records, it’s plenty for anyone who doesn’t spend much time on the autobahn or the race track.

The car gets its juice from over 5,000 individual power cells, joined together to form a single composite battery. At peak, the motor can crank out 204-horsepower and 162 ft/lb of torque – not too shabby for an electric car.

With a cruising range of 150 miles (appx. 240 km), the MINI E should be fine for heading back and forth to the office, grocery, or any other short haul local destination.

If you live in Southern California, New York City or New Jersey, you could be selected to be one of the lucky early test drivers. For your chance to test out the new MINI E, head on over to MINI Space and fill out the form for more information on applying.

[MINI E Spec Sheet]

Models range from a basic LCD monitor for checking out the latest episode of Yo Gabba Gabba!, to advanced touchscreen versions with Bluetooth integration for your dialing your “hands-free” phone. And while some models do offer integration with backup cameras so you can see what’s behind you when heading in reverse, and most act as a mirror when turned off, why the heck would you buy one of these unless you planned on having it turned on most of the time?

The scary thing is that we’re not just talking about some one-off technology here. If you check out the CnBuyNet Chinese import website, you’ll find an entire page of these things ranging in price from about $50 to $100 USD. Gee, I can’t wait to see these in every car in my neighborhood.

I was riding in a car with someone the other day who insisted on texting on his Blackberry the whole time, and I thought I was gonna end up in a fiery wreck. Why do we constantly feel the need to give drivers one more reason to do anything but pay attention to the road?

Simply plug in up to three Compact Flash cards, and this nifty device will set up a RAID array between them, which you can connect to your computer’s high-speed SATA port. With three cards in place, you’ll have a fully-redundant RAID 5 array. But if you’re just looking for raw speed and don’t care too much about the risk of data loss, you can just run a smoking-fast RAID 0 configuration with as few as two drives. As the system will only run at the speed of the slowest installed memory card, I’d recommend that you use the same type of card for all slots.

With more acronyms in its name than should be allowed in a single product, the DIY SSD SATA array is available from GeekStuff4U for about $190 USD.

Whether you’re ready to head out on a cross-country road trip, or just around the corner to the grocery, all you need to do is surf over to to Google Maps, print out the directions, transcribe them onto this GPS-enabled pad, then hit the road.

The Paper GPS notepad lets you write up to ten turn-by-turn directions per page, including little arrows you can circle for turns, and boxes for how many miles you need to travel. When you’re all done, you can check off whether you made it to your destination, or got hopelessly lost. Given the fact that my Magellan GPS told me it was 370 miles from Milwaukee to Chicago, maybe this isn’t such a bad idea after all.

The Paper GPS is available from Perpetual Kid for just $6.50 per pad.

Designed by Mexico City industrial designer Joel Escalona, the USB bomb should keep your data safe, since its design is likely to deter to anybody who might have thoughts of stealing it, lest they might get blown to smithereens. The device looks like one of those bombs that Wile E. Coyote might have purchased from the ACME catalog, or maybe from those old Spy vs. Spy cartoons in MAD magazine.

As an added bonus, it’s big enough to house either a ton of flash memory or a hard drive, given its oversize design. At this point, it’s still just a prototype, but I’d certainly buy one.

[via pan-dan]

Created by SolarMemo, the petite Wedisk flash drive looks like a wee Wii-mote, but press the “A” button, and the USB connector pops out of the top of the controller for you to plug into your computer.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The Wedisk is available in capacities from 1GB to 8GB, but is currently only available in custom production runs (especially if you happen to work for Nintendo). So if you’ve got a bunch of Wii-having friends, take up a collection and order up a couple thousand of these puppies.

[via Gizmodo]

These officially-licensed RealDrive Nano mini racers include Testarossa, F430, 512BB and Enzo models. They speed around your room using infrared remote controls which each operate on different wavelengths so you can race up to four cars at the same time. They’re quite detailed and even feature tiny LED cornering lights.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Best of all, they don’t require costly gasoline or insurance policies to drive. So head on over to Japanese importer Strapya-World and pick up a few. They’re only ¥2,690 (appx. $25 USD) each, just a teensy bit less than that real Ferrari would cost.

The player includes CyberLink’s PowerDVD BD Edition, providing playback of Blu-ray discs on your computer screen. In addition to store-bought Blu-ray movies, the player supports discs burned in MPEG-2 or H.264 format, and standard DVD discs or recorded DVDs encoded with MPEG-2 or AVCHD formats.

The $199.95 BDU-X10S is available for pre-order now and should start shipping later this month.

The latest in the “Freshly Baked” series of USB flash storage devices from Vavolo, the fortune cookies come in both 1GB ($29.99) and 2GB ($49.99) versions.

I just opened mine up and it simply read “a fool and his money will soon be parted.”

Buttons on the sides of each car automatically trigger ejector seats that make its passengers and driver go airborne on contact. A carefully placed side impact should propel two of the occupants, but it’ll take a serious rollover wreck to get all four of them out and eating the pavement.

Each car comes with an RF wireless remote control and is propelled by AA batteries. A pair of the crashing stock cars costs £24.99 (appx. $44.98 USD) over on I Want One Of Those.

The Funtrak Mini Paintball Tank is a scaled down version of a real tank, featuring a motorized drive system, and a tread drive that lets you maneuver through the roughest backyard obstacles. It’s got a built-in roll cage and engine firewall, and is actually certified for use on the road — in the UK, that is — I have a funny feeling that they wouldn’t let one of these on the street here in the States.

Just like the real world, phony weapons comes at a hefty price. The Paintball Panzer will set you back £8,000 (about $14,400 USD). Each tank is custom built, so you might have to wait up to three months to get yours.

[BornRich via Crave]

A couple of builders from Germany painstakingly dissasembled an old 5-1/4″ hard drive, recalibrated the motor to run at a speed that lines up the drive precisely with marked hour indicators, then modified the head mechanism to move in 60 step-per-hour increments to indicate minutes.

For some reason, they weren’t able to get the motor to turn at exactly 24 rotations per day, instead turning 32 times, and quickly skipping the four “hours” between 12 and 1 on the dial.

Incredibly, the entire device is built from recycled parts (note the old power supply unit that serves as a base). Other than the electronics which control the speed and sequence of actions, the hard drive mechanism remains pretty much unchanged from its original state.

You can read more about the complexities of this very cool build here.

[via Hackaday via CrunchGear]

Just like real penguins, they wear tiny striped scarves, and their heads flip open to reveal a USB connector (at least that’s what I thought I heard during my marine biology class). Each little bird holds up to 1GB of files, which isn’t a lot in computer terms, but probably more than a real penguin could hold in its tiny pea-sized brain.

They retail for ¥3980 each (about $34 USD), and come in blue, grey and black variants (again, just like real penguins). If you need to get your penguin fix, you’ll have to see if you can get Japanese retailer to Joshin ship you one.

[via tfts]

Developed by Hirose-Fukushima Robotics Lab, the Roller-Walker robot walks like an insect when in walking mode, but then can transform itself into a rolling, wheel ‘bot when it’s instructed to. You’ve definitely got to watch the video clip to get the full effect – it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen a robot do.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

I’m assuming that this dual approach allows the robot to deal with more challenging terrain when in walking mode, then move around more quickly on flat land in wheel mode. It’s all very cool stuff indeed.

[via Robots.Net]

Just plug your SD, SDHC, MMC, Mini SD, RS MMC or MicroSD/T-Flash memory card into the badge and you’ll be able to carry your data wherever you go. When you need to access your files, just plug the built-in USB cable into your computer and you’re ready to go.

It’s definitely a bit more bulky than a regular ID badge holder, but if you don’t want to carry around an extra USB drive, it could be handy. You can pick one up from Brando for just $14.