Hard drive aficionados rejoice! Check out the new Mercury On-The-Go 160GB portable hard drive brought to you by OWC.

Designed for the demanding professional in mind (or not), the Mercury On-The-Go portable hard drive is one of the faster portable hard drives on the market, running at a speedy 7200RPM. It’s also got interfaces for everything so never again choose between FireWire 800/400 and USB 2, plus it’s totally bus powered too. The thing is actually quite small for 160 gigs but the price sure isn’t - $279.99. However considering OWC is throwing in full retail versions of DataRescue III for OS X and NovaBackup for Windows, maybe it’s justified.

The prospect of having a HDD without a spinning platter is an enticing one. The pluses of no moving parts, and the lowered power consumption which is a huge buzzkill on laptops mean there really aren’t any huge downsides. Except for the fact that the sizes aren’t anywhere near where they need to be.

Some of us will probably never be able to ditch the old-school platter based HDD. The computer I’m at right now has two 250gb drives and a 500gb one. Suffice to say for the time being I won’t be stepping away from the standard storage methods.

But 160gb flash based HDD for a laptop? That’d be enough for most people, myself included. And that’s what Adtron recently announced. No prices listed in the press release, and I’m quite sure it’ll be crazy-expensive. But it’d be perfect for the military and it’s a harbinger (but a good one) of things to come.

Gibson has taken a classic musical instrument and shrunk it down to be a…portable storage solution? A 1959 Les Paul Standard was chosen to kick off Gibson’s Signature Series flash drives, and I guess it’s a good choice as it is truly a classic - but did we really need a mini-guitar USB drive?

I do like how there is a mini case, and how the USB cable plugs into the bottom of the drive, just as a 1/4″ cable would on a real guitar. What I don’t like is that we all already have too many USB key drives.

Stats:
-1GB of storage capacity
-USB 2.0 transfer rates (480Mbps)
-Data retention up to 9 years
-LED indicator
-Waste of money

[Product page at Gibson.com]

If you feel that measly 200 gig hard drive isn’t enough, there’s hope. “Fujitsu was able to achieve a one-dimensional array nanohole pattern with a 25 nanometer pitch.”

Now what does that mean exactly? I’m not sure, I’m a bit rusty on my storage device production techniques since I stopped collecting cardboard boxes but this will supposedly allow for 3.5 inch drives to hold 5 terabytes in the, hopefully, near future. That’s more storage than I can shake a stick at and trust me, I’m a good stick shaker… that came out wrong.

[via DailyTech]