We’re a few precious breaths from 2010, and if there’s anything we’re looking forward to, it’s some wicked fast USB 3.0 storage — Intel be damned . Set to hit shelves sometime in January, A-DATA’s N002 Combo Flash Drive sports both SATA II and a USB 3.0 connection. Using the latter, the drive boasts up to 200MB/sec read and 170 MB/sec write speeds. Or if you’re feeling retro, you can take advantage of that backwards-compatibility and connect via USB 2.0. Now, we don’t know how much this bad boy will cost, but it will be bundled with A-DATA UFD to GO software. Of course, this thing is not nearly as cute as the Kissing Octopus USB drive , but we’re sure it’s not without its charms.

The Olive 4 HD isn’t too different from the Olive Opus N4 we saw back in July , but has a few nice additions and a steeper price: The 2TB version now comes in at $2,000. Youch. Olive’s music players are the kind of crazy high-end AV hardware that peasants like you and I shouldn’t even be reading about , let alone contemplating. The 4 HD rips CDs to its huge 2TB hard drive, in addition to streaming from a PC, to be played through crazy high-end speakers.

I seriously need the new WD Scorpio one terabyte drive. I want to be able to tote around all my desktop data, without any external drives hanging around, and $250 seems like a little price to pay for that. LAKE FOREST, Calif., July 27 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — WD (NYSE: WDC) today announced two new mobile hard drives that reach new capacity extremes. The highlight is a one terabyte model — the industry’s highest-capacity 2.5-inch drive available. Industry-leading 333 GB-per-platter technology enables the new WD Scorpio® Blue(TM) SATA 2.5-inch hard drives to offer mobile storage device and notebook users an enormous 1 TB capacity.

In response to an Engadget Japan post entitled ” Cruel Star Wars USB drives ,” one incredibly talented reader went ahead and one-upped the entire collection with a custom made Empire Strikes Back Luke Skywalker drive. All you need to know is that the USB input is accessed by severing his hand. Search your feelings, you know this to be awesome. Gallery: Custom-made Luke Skywalker USB drive is impressive. Most impressive

Brando, how kind of you to deliver us a chocolate popsicle shaped USB drive to stave off the summer heat. For sure, children are going to choke on this. [ Brando via Giz.jp ]

RunCore’s always offered fast SSDs , but we’re not so sure its new 2.5-inch ProCore IV drives offer the right mix of price, performance, and storage for the target market — sure, they’re fast, with up to 240MBps reads and 185MBps writes, but they’re also expensive, starting at $179 for 32GB and quickly ramping up to $599 for 128GB and a whopping $999 for 256GB. That’s a lot of scratch for the average laptop customer, and while the speed gains may be obvious, we’re not so sure the storage tradeoff seems worth it. That said, RunCore’s made it pretty easy to swap one of these puppies in: each drive includes a USB enclosure and cloning software that’ll have you up and running at high speed in a jiff. Yeah, we’re on the fence — check out a video demo after the break and tell us if you think it’s worth it. Read - RunCore Pro IV press release Read - jkkmobile tests Continue reading RunCore Pro IV SSDs launched, tested, seem pricey Filed under: Storage RunCore Pro IV SSDs launched, tested, seem pricey originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 May 2009 12:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds .

“Another day, another replaced hard drive ,” Chris Cook thought at his tech support desk while unwrapping the unit, fresh from storage. Until he turned the fixed Dell on and heard the weirdest rattling noise ever. The drive didn’t mount. It spinned up, but nothing happened. The BIOS didn’t show anything and the noise, that horrible rattling noise of a thousand-cockroach horde running viciously through a tin tube, kept roaring.

We Americans have Fusion-io’s ioDrive and OCZ’s Z Drive to look forward to when it comes to slamming down a PCIe-based SSD solution in our lightning fast rigs, but what about the savvy Japanese? Enter PhotoFast, who has just revealed a luscious PCIe SSD of its own, ranging from 256GB to one whole terabyte in size. The unit includes a couple of SSDs hooked together in a RAID0 setup in order to provide up to 750MB/sec read rates and 700MB/sec write rates. As with most SSDs, this unit also boasts a 1.5 million hour MTBF and should work perfectly within Windows XP and Vista machines. Those in and around Osaka can expect these to land around mid-October for about the cost of a new TV — seriously. [Via Engadget Japanese ] Filed under: Storage PhotoFast intros 256GB to 1TB G-Monster PCIe SSD originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:43:00 EST.

Kevin Rose , the Silicon Valley’s John Mayer, just got a few Tesla S concept shots leaked to him. The S, Tesla’s $50,000ish electric 4-door Sedan, is supposed to be unveiled in Los Angeles today. What’s most interesting to tech enthusiasts is the fact that the middle panel seems to be one gigantic screen. Is it touchscreen? I damn well hope so

Second parts are never good, except for the Godfather II and The Empire Strikes Back. This fight between the floppy sides of the Force is also a second part, better than the first one. The author says he took “the audio output of an amplifier and added a clamping diode and feed the signal into one of the phases on the worm drive motor. To give the motor a louder sound I added a small DC voltage to the other phase. This coil had the oppisite polarity then that of the audio phase.” Apparently, only the lightsaber sound was added to the montage later. [ Star Wars Blog ]