Toshiba intros Canvio portable HDD lineup, tops out at 1TB

Following the announcement of its new high capacity notebook hard drives, Toshiba has unveiled an equally capacious portable offering. The Canvio lineup is comprised of four units: 500GB ($120), 640GB ($140), 750GB ($160), and 1TB ($200).

The latter two are branded as "Canvio Plus," but the only variation seems to be in storage, dimensions, and price. The smaller two measure 3.1 x 4.7 x 0.53-inches and weigh 5.2oz, while the larger drives are 0.12 inches thicker and 1.1oz heavier. All of the drives use USB 2.0 for data and power, are available in five different colors (blue, green, red, black and silver), and ship with a three-year warranty.


In addition to being "pocket sized" the drives come with easy-to-use backup software, which has improved search capabilities, simpler step-by-step restore functionality to retrieve lost files, and brings more features for advanced users.

It's worth mentioning that the company links an interesting poll on the Canvio product page which shows that Americans are more afraid of losing irreplaceable documents than having a wallet stolen, being audited by the IRS, or even losing their job.

WD intros standard-height 2.5-inch 750GB Scorpio Blue HDD

Western Digital already shipped the industry's first 2.5-inch 1TB hard drive last summer, but unfortunately for most, it couldn't be used as a drop-in solution for upgrading one's laptop drive. The reason? It relies on an unorthodox 12.5mm height form factor, while the vast majority of laptops only support 9.5mm height drives. Now, the outfit has pushed out a 750GB Scorpio Blue, a 2.5-incher that does indeed utilize the standard height form factor, and while this here unit includes Advanced Format and WhisperDrive, the 5,400RPM spindle speed is admittedly disappointing. It's tough to argue with the $149 price, though, and it's available now if you've been hankering for more space within your mobile workhorse.

Dell Precision M4500 now shipping with $1,549 starting price

With specs and prices easily reaching into the stratosphere, we weren't quite sure where Dell's new 15-inch Precision M4500 workstation would land -- the 17-inch M6500 has a starting price of $1,799, but that's only after $310 of "instant savings." Well, it looks like we're getting off (relatively) easy with the M4500, with a Core i5-520M 2.5GHz model running for $1,549 and still managing to pack in those NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M Graphics. Of course, we imagine you'll quickly be running up that bill -- 2GB of slow RAM, a 1366 x 768 LCD, and no WiFi just aren't going to cut it -- but with tempting options like a secondary 64GB SSD minicard drive and the ever-frivilous Precision ON, it's not like we were sticking near that base price anyway. Expect to spec out something truly delicious in the $2,500+ range. Our biggest disappointment? Backlit keyboard is optional, something that's standard even on the Vostro line these days.