IRVINE, Calif. – Mar. 20, 2012 – Western Digital® (NYSE: WDC) today announced the next generation of its top-selling My Passport® line of portable hard drives, offering consumers a fresh new enclosure design and the first-ever 2 TB capacity in a portable drive. Now available in five popular colors: white, black, silver, blue, and red, with a range of capacities beginning from 500 GB, the new sleeker My Passport portable drives offer digital consumers an appealing array of storage options that reflect their personal style. Additionally, the new My Passport drives offer

WD SmartWareâ„¢ automatic backup software and WD Securityâ„¢ for password protection and hardware encryption.
With the addition of premium finishes, specially-engineered to make the outer shell more resistant to scratches and fingerprints, the new My Passport external drives feature ultra-fast USB 3.0 connectivity; USB 2.0 compatibility; continuous, automatic backup software; and password protection with hardware encryption. The included software offers the flexibility to customize the drive to a user’s storage preferences: installing all features, just the components needed, or using the drive without the software. The new 2 TB model offers massive capacity in an amazing pocket-sized enclosure, affording plenty of secure storage for all of one’s photos, video, music and other important files.

Given the small form factor and easy portability of My Passport drives, the built-in security features of password protection and hardware encryption help protect files from unauthorized use, making the drives safe data repositories for data while offering peace of mind to busy consumers on the go.
“More than money, jewelry and other valuables, the item most missed if ever lost or stolen is one’s computer – and everything on it – so our goal in launching the next-generation of the popular My Passport drives is to encourage more consumers to protect their data before something happens,” said Jim Welsh, executive vice president and general manager of WD’s branded products and consumer electronics groups. “The new My Passport makes backing up and preserving one’s digital life easier, reliable and more secure than ever – it’s the perfect blend of monstrous capacity, reliability and user-friendly technology in a sleek form factor, now in five colors.”

Pricing and Availability
My Passport drives come with a 2-year limited warranty are available online at the WD store at www.wdstore.com and at select retailers and distributors. MSRP is $129.99 USD for 500 GB, $149.99 USD for 750 GB, $179.99 USD for 1 TB, $199.99 for 1.5 TB and $249.99 USD for the new 2 TB edition

Intel and Micron have long partnered on NAND flash production, under the joint company Intel Micron Flash Technologies (IMFT.) Previously, the companies had enjoyed a half-and-half split, but the announcement of Intel’s withdrawal from manufacturing leaves Micron holding a far bigger slice of the pie.

Under the terms of the revised agreement, Intel is to peddle its shares in twain wafer factories to Micron for $600 million. Half of that will be provided to Intel in the compose of bloodless tough cash, while the remaining $300 million is to be left in Micron’s hands as an proceed deposit on Intel’s future NAND flash purchases.

It’s clear to see where Intel is going here: it’s looking to decrease its exposure in the NAND flash market while still ensuring it has an adequate supply of cutting-edge chips for its undertaking and consumer grade solid-state hobble (SSD) products.

Micron, meanwhile, gets a near-guarantee of $300 million of future commerce as well as sole control of the Intel Micron Flash Singapore and Intel Micron Flash Technologies US assets. The jointly-owned manufacturing plant in Utah, meanwhile, will remain as-is with minimal changes to its ongoing production of 20nm-based NAND flash products.

‘Micron’s joint venture NAND development efforts with Intel are a mannequin of innovation, productivity and effectiveness,’ claimed Micron’s chief executive Mark Durcan. ‘With IM Flash and its associated programs, our companies have become leaders in the NAND flash arena. These modern agreements construct on that success.’

‘The Intel-Micron partnership has created industry-leading NAND flash memory technology and developed a robust global manufacturing network. The modern NAND flash supply accord with Micron gives Intel better flexibility to meet growing beseech for SSDs and other products,’ claimed Robert Crooke, general manager of the Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group at Intel.

Backup Basics

Generally speaking, there’s local backup and remote backup. Local, as the word suggests, is on-site: anything from burning a DVD of important files and keeping it in your desk drawer, to a USB (or eSATA, or FireWire, or some other connection) hard-drive you plug in directly, or a network-attached storage (NAS) device that serves one or more computers on your local wired or wireless network. Remote backup could be as simple as leaving a copy of your home DVD or HDD files at work or with a friend, or – more commonly now – online in some sort of “cloud” repository.

Redundancy is another key part of backup: basically, how resilient the backup system itself is to hardware failure (and other issues, like theft or damage). Burning two DVDs rather than one is redundancy, but more common is using a so-called array of drives (either directly-connected or NAS) that each carry a copy of your data. If one drive dies, the data is safe on the second (or third, or fourth, etc.) and can be repopulated on the new drive you slot in to replace it.

Increasingly popular is a hybrid of local and remote backup, and that’s where the LaCie CloudBox comes in. It consists of both a local NAS drive and a companion online cloud store, automatically copying anything placed onto the drive up into the cloud.

Hardware

LaCie’s favorite designer, Neil Poulton, does the honors with the CloudBox, though the external drive itself is probably more a case of what was left out than what’s been included. A compact 4.6 x 4.6 x 1.5 inch black plastic box, the only real elements of interest are the recessed status LED in a notch under the leading edge (which flickers blue with varying degrees of frequency while active, and red when frustrated) along with a gigabit ethernet port, power input and button on the back, the latter the only physical control and used to turn the CloudBox on or off.

Inside is a 100GB 2.5-inch hard-drive, non-user-accessible. That sounds small and, indeed, it is. Even the most humble of netbooks of recent years have offered more storage, and with some desktop-replacement laptops packing 1TB+ the CloudBox seems hopelessly naive at first glance.

LaCie’s intention, though, is seemingly to force a sense of perspective on the would-be user. Local storage can be capacious and swift; cloud storage is generally more expensive and, being limited by the narrow-bore upload pipe of most home internet connections, time-consuming to shuttle files up to ‘net-based safety. There’s no choice as to which files get replicated online: everything placed onto the local drive is copied to the cloud. Sure, you could dump all of your video files onto the CloudBox, but it’s really more for vital documents: your email backup, your tax returns and all those Word files you’d be distraught to lose; your final year project or your latest work report.

Noise levels from the box, even when the hard-drive is active, are very low. There’s no warning on heat levels, beyond the on-device logs, though the CloudBox will email you notifications when space is running low.

Software and Performance

As you’d hope from a product with simplicity as its watchword, setup of the CloudBox is straightforward. Physically, it’s a case of plugging it into a spare ethernet port on your router with the bundled cable, plugging in the power supply and then waiting for the light to steady on blue.

A bundled CD offers LaCie’s Network Assistant tool, basically a CloudBox-seeker which lives in the system tray of your PC or Mac and works as a shortcut to the browser-based setup page. More adept users will bypass it altogether and surf to either http://cloudbox or its IP address (assigned and revealed by your router). First up there’s the Setup Wizard, used to establish an administrator username and password as well as punch in the contract number for the complimentary 12-month subscription to the cloud storage service.

From that point on, anything more complex is optional. You can simply begin dropping files onto the CloudBox – mounting it as a network drive in your OS of choice makes this easier – and relax in the knowledge that they’re being funneled up into the cloud shortly after. By pairing local and remote storage, your computer needn’t be on while the time-consuming upload process takes place: the CloudBox itself handles all that. We whipped out the power cable during the initial upload, then turned the NAS back on and it automatically picked up where it had left off. Obviously, had we taken an axe to the local drive before it had finished uploading, our data would be in so many unrecoverable slices, but simple power failures needn’t be a headache.

There are plenty more settings to be tinkered with in the LaCie CloudBox dashboard, however, including a simple counter showing how many out of the 100GB have been done, and when the most recent cloud upload took place. Some network information, details on user accounts – you can set up multiple users, each having access to their own files but nobody else’s, and optionally with a set quota of the total storage that they can use – together with log records, a countdown to when your cloud backup plan expires and the option to manually set upload and download speed limits so as not to saturate your broadband connection are also easily accessed.

Then there are the restore buttons, either to selectively restore certain files from the cloud to your computer, or to fully restore everything in the cloud to the CloudBox. The latter is useful if the hard-drive in the local NAS dies, and you want to repopulate its replacement (your user settings are also restored). The cloud storage keeps the last ten complete backups, so you can step back through previous versions of files: handy if you discover a file was recently corrupted and that the most recent backup has preserved that corrupted file.

What you can’t do, however, is log into the cloud store and access files remotely. Unlike most cloud-based backup systems, LaCie makes no provision for grabbing files while on the move, either using a browser-based interface or a smartphone app of some sort. The cloud, instead, is resolutely intended as another layer of redundancy; 128-bit AES encryption is applied as standard by the CloudBox itself – before the files ever leave your home or office network – and only your username and password can unlock them.

Pricing and Value

At $199 (in the US; £179.90 in the UK) for 100GB, the CloudBox is hardly the cheapest external drive we’ve ever seen. For the same amount, or less, you could have a 2TB+ NAS with drive redundancy, though obviously you’d then lack the cloud element of the LaCie option. It’s worth bearing in mind that many NAS drives support online backup too, though you’ll have to set up – and pay for – a cloud backup account; it’s all less straightforward than the CloudBox makes things.

That, then, is what you’re really paying for: simplicity. The CloudBox forces a conscious decision about which files are really important, locks them up with AES encryption automatically, and mirrors up to ten versions online, all after a few minutes setup. A further 12 months of cloud rental is priced at €99 in Europe.

Wrap-Up

Most users with any amount of network proficiency would probably be able to piece together a cheaper, more flexible local/cloud backup system than the CloudBox. That’s not to say LaCie’s drive misses the mark, however. Whereas a regular NAS might be a weekend’s frustration for basic users – arguably the most likely to avoid backing-up altogether – the CloudBox’s convenience makes it a plug & play option in which the “plug” aspect doesn’t demand a degree in computer science to complete. You could reasonably mail your tech-naive family or friends a CloudBox and expect them to have their essential files secured with minor effort.

What is true is that the CloudBox will most likely only work as one part of a backup solution. 100GB is insufficient for most individual users to fully backup their entire digital lives; share that out with several people, as LaCie makes easy, and that’s an even smaller proportion of each hard-drive covered. Dollar for gigabyte, it’s a wasteful way of preserving all but the rarest of digital music and video collections. A workable system might include the CloudBox for securing documents, precious digital photo originals and email backups, while cheaper external drives (either directly connected or networked) handle space-hungry multimedia. Yes, there’s an extra element of risk, but then that’s the implicit balance you find with any backup strategy.

Sony has demonstrated the face-recognition and tracking capabilities of the upcoming PlayStation Vita handheld, using the portable console’s front-facing camera to track head movement and have on-screen avatars respond accordingly. In the demo, filmed by Siliconera and which you can see after the cut, Sony showed a two-way video chat being held between a pair of animated avatars, the head, mouth, eye and other movements being mapped to those of the gamer.

Although head-tracking has been done before, the system Sony demonstrated was able to track minor details like eye-blinking and eyebrow twitches, for a more lifelike animation. Sony wasn’t saying a video calling app would necessarily be the final use of the technology, 4gamer reports, but that the software was merely a demonstration of the power of the Vita’s abilities and its potential in augmented reality (AR) gaming.

Rather than using specific glyphs that can be identified and tracked by an AR system, Sony’s Yoshikatsu Kanemaru suggested that objects and even people could be distinguished by the Vita and have computer-generated graphics overlaid. It’s a technology that appears to have borrowed from Sony’s previous SmartAR research, which can intelligently spot unique elements -such as posters, magazines or more complex forms, like body outlines – in the camera’s frame and then track them accordingly.

All of the boards in the series use the dual intelligent Processors 2 tech with DIGI+ VRM power delivery for precision power adjustment and control. The boards also provide extra DRAM power to increase stability and has a feature packed BIOS. It sounds like the family will be overclocker friendly.

The mainboards also supports SATA 6Gb/s storage interface with RAID 0/1/10 support. The chipset in the boards also supports USB 3.0 natively with no need for a secondary controller. Intel still lacks native support for USB 3.0 and all Intel chipset boards are using a secondary controller for USB 3.0 ports. There is no word on when these boards will land and how much they will cost.