Iomega today announced a new Mac Companion Hard Drive which incorporates a large capacity desktop hard drive (2 TB or 3 TB models are available) with two USB ports to connect a printer or another external drive, two FireWire ports and an additional high-powered USB charging port for an iPad or iPhone.

With the new Iomega Mac Companion Hard Drive, Mac users now have a convenient and stylish way to quickly charge their iPads with the bonus of plenty of new storage capacity for their Mac computer,” said Jonathan Huberman, president of Iomega Corporation. “With more than nine million iPads sold in the last quarter alone, the new Mac Companion Hard Drive is the perfect complement for all those iPad owners.

Iomega has made special effort to make a device that matches and suits Macs, which is most notable in the design and stylings of the device – not only is it sleek with its metal enclosure but the very shape of the Mac Companion Hard Drive has been sculpted so that it sits perfectly on the iMac or Thunderbolt Display stand, tapering out at the back. The whole device is fairly simplistic but stylish in design and it hides all but the high-powered USB port at the back of the device. Iomega has left the three visible sides with nothing but the high-powered port on the right hand side of the device and four LED lights on the front panel of the device to indicate HDD capacity.

The charging port is a high-powered 2.1 Amp hookup that makes it easy and convenient to charge your iPad and other portable Apple devices so they’re ready to go when you are.

The hard drives are also pre-formatted as HFS+ so that they are compatible out of the box with Mac OS X, and whilst the lack of Thunderbolt is a little disappointing, this device looks like a solid option for anyone looking for an external hard drive for their Macs. The Iomega Mac Companion Hard Drive will initially be exclusive to Apple online and retail stores at a cost of $195 for the 2 TB model and $295 for the 3 TB model.

Jump past the break for some more pictures of the device.

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Apple is trying to convince many that Thunderbolt is the next big thing when it comes to input/output technology, yet Thunderbolt-ready devices aren’t yet available to consumers who wish to utilize their new Mac’s Thunderbolt interface. Manufacturers have already announced a few Thunderbolt powered devices as seen on the NAB show floor, and at this year’s Computex, LaCie and Promise are demonstrating just how fast Thunderbolt enabled storage can be.

Promise demoed two storage systems branded as the Pegasus R4 and Pegasus R6 in four and six bay configurations respectively. These storage arrays have two Thunderbolt ports so they can be daisy chained to the same interface (up to six devices), although video output requires that the last connection be via DisplayPort. The arrays support RAID 0/1/5/6 and RAID 10, and support both 3.5″ and 2.5″ drives. While 6 Gbps drives are supported, only a transfer rate of 850 MB/s was noted in RAID 0 by AnandTech. With performing transfer rates at 633 MB/s in reading and 734 MB/s in writing, the Pegasus storage arrays aren’t too shabby when it comes to moving storage from your Mac to your hard drives, and speed and data-redundancy geeks can look for a late June release. Past the break, we have a quick video on Promise’s hardware demo and more on LaCie’s competitive alternative.

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With all the recent talks about MobileMe and the cloud, it’s easy to forget most users still don’t have access to fast and reliable Internet connections that would allow them to stream their entire music library, movies and photos off the web. Whilst streaming is undoubtedly the future of media consumption (just look at the Apple TV, Google Music Beta, Netflix, or Spotify), managing media locally still plays an important role, especially for iPhone and iPad owners who are forced to keep everything organized into iTunes, and sync. Seagate wants to become the new middle man in this scenario, and with the official announcement of the GoFlex Satellite this morning, it looks like they have a chance to provide a better solution for many users.

The GoFlex Satellite is an external portable 500 GB drive that’s got a wireless connection and can stream content up to 3 connected devices at once. It’s got a built-in battery with 25 hours of promised life, and can stream 5 hours of continuous movie content. It works with iPhones and iPads through the GoFlex Media app, but Seagate says it’ll also be compatible with other WiFi-enabled devices and it will be accessible on a local network from a web browser. The portable drive, offering way more storage than an high-end iPhone or iPad, is clearly meant to carry all your music and HD movies around, bridging the gap between local storage and streaming. So while you’ll have to carry yet another gadget in your bag, at least no cable will be required to beam content to iOS. Most of all, music and movies won’t need to br synced locally to an iPhone or iPad; on the other hand, media can be transferred from your Mac or PC to the GoFlex Satellite with a USB 3.0 (USB 2.0 compatible) cable and the Media Sync desktop software.

With the growth of the tablet and iPad markets and the larger volumes of high-quality media now being consumed, there is a clear need for access to content that is not plagued with the challenges of streamed video over the Internet,” said Patrick Connolly, vice president and general manager of Seagate’s retail group. “The unfortunate fact is that these popular new mobile devices are hampered by their limited storage capacity while one of their primary functions is that of media consumption.

“With the GoFlex Satellite mobile wireless storage, we wished to create an elegant solution that provides real value to the multitude of iPad users out there by delivering a seamless connection to local storage. No longer will a consumer feel as though it is a compromise to purchase a lower capacity tablet or iPad. With GoFlex Satellite, people will be able to carry their entire media library with them without the need for wires or the web at a fraction of the cost of adding 3G or purchasing or a higher capacity tablet.

In spite of non-exceptional battery life (5 hours of video doesn’t sound exactly great, considering I like to watch my Lost episodes one after the other), I think this is a great idea, and I’m definitely looking forward to the product. The GoFlex Satellite ships this summer, and it’s available for pre-order now at $199.99 from Seagate.com, Amazon and BestBuy.com.

One of the perks of having an iMac, be it a 21.5-inch or 27-inch model, is that you’re signing up for an all-in-one solution that packs everything you need into a “screen” that only needs to be placed your desk, connected to a power source, and it’s ready to go. The iMac — certainly Apple’s top choice in the consumer desktop line — isn’t meant to offer “user serviceable parts”, meaning what you get with Apple’s standard configuration is what you’ll have to stick with until the end of the product’s life cycle. In the past years, however, users who wanted to customize their iMac experience with custom parts like, say, different internal hard drives or better RAM, were able to open an iMac (provided they followed the complex instructions that require to pay attention when disassembling the aluminum enclosure and display) and fit in compatible components to enhance the performances of the machine.

As noted by Michael at Other World Computing’s blog, however, the new 2011 iMacs — the ones with Thunderbolt, Sandy Bridge processors and better graphics — don’t allow you to use any other hard drive but Apple’s custom ones, which are running a custom firmware to provide temperature monitoring through a new 7-pin SATA connector.

For the main 3.5″ SATA hard drive bay in the new 2011 machines, Apple has altered the SATA power connector itself from a standard 4-pin power configuration to a 7-pin configuration. Hard drive temperature control is regulated by a combination of this cable and Apple proprietary firmware on the hard drive itself. From our testing, we’ve found that removing this drive from the system, or even from that bay itself, causes the machine’s hard drive fans to spin at maximum speed and replacing the drive with any non-Apple original drive will result in the iMac failing the Apple Hardware Test (AHT).

In examining the 2011 27″ iMac’s viability for our Turnkey Upgrade Service, every workaround we’ve tried thus far to allow us to upgrade the main bay factory hard drive still resulted in spinning fans and an Apple Hardware Test failure. We swapped the main drive out (in this case a Western Digital Black WD1001FALS) with the exact same model drive from our inventory which resulted in a failure. We’ve installed our Mercury Pro 6G SSD in that bay, it too results in ludicrous speed engaged fans and an AHT failure. In short, the Apple-branded main hard drive cannot be moved, removed or replaced.

To add insult to injury, the latest iMac EFI Update 1.6 unleashed 6Gb/s speeds on two internal ports – and naturally, one of them is the proprietary, firmware-limited, 7200RPM main drive that can’t take advantage of those speeds anyway.

Michael argues that by “closing” the system, Apple’s being evil in not allowing geeks and users who buy stuff on OWC or other Mac hardware shops to upgrade their iMacs to better configurations. As Marco Arment explains though (and I personally agree with him here), the iMac’s not really meant for fiddling and user customizations. Like I said above, when you purchase an iMac you’re signing up for the all-in-one idea of a machine that provides Apple’s latest and greatest innovations in desktop miniaturization technology — by using custom cables, firmwares and hard drives, Apple makes sure you get the best performances out of your iMac, with the “downside” of being unable to customize it. This aspect, of course, can also be seen a way for Apple to make sure that angry modders don’t queue up in the Apple Store asking for free replacements when they purposely opened an iMac to play around with its internals.

You can always find an old iMac online and make it your main machine to mod and improve over time, but you won’t be able to enjoy the improvements in Sandy Bridge architecture and Thunderbolt connectivity. And those, if you ask me, are pretty convincing reasons to get a 2011 iMac and stick with its default hard drives.

I’m a proud owner of a WD My Book 750 GB edition with FireWire 800 — a trusted system when it comes to storing my media and using a second partition for Time Machine — but I guess I’ll be making the switch to the newly announced My Book Studio Edition II pretty soon. Western Digital has, in fact, revealed this new My Book product that goes straight to 6 TB of storage in RAID, has a quad interface, and it’s compatible with Mac and Windows. The best part? Western Digital touts the model as “Mac-ready” with HFS filesystem out of the box and full Time Machine compatibility.

The My Book Studio Edition II comes with the usual FireWire 400, FireWire 800, eSATA and USB 2.0 connections — no, there’s no Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 here. Still, you should get pretty decent transfer times with FireWire 800 — I truly recommend you consider FireWire for your next Time Machine or SuperDuper backups.

The My Book Studio Edition II can be yours for “just” $550. You could get a new iPad for that price, I know, but if you’re serious about backups and external media storage (hello, iTunes) you should consider this. Press release below. [via Gizmodo] (more…)

The Apple Store is down, the new MacBook Pros are only a few hours away at this point, yet Mac4Ever is posting a photo of the specs of the new MacBook Pro 15-inch (although it’s not specified whether it’s a low-end or high-end model).

First off, no SSD. There’s a 500 GB 5400 rpm hard drive in there. The photo also shows the following details:

- Intel Core i7, quad-core, 2Ghz

- 4 GB SDRAM DD3

- Thunderbolt port as seen on the leaked MacBook Pro 13″ photos

- AMD Radeon HD 6490M graphic processor

- FaceTime HD camera

- SuperDrive 8x

- SDXC, two USB ports, ForeWire 800

- 1440 x 900 screen resolution

Mac4Ever posted a series of leaked shots yesterday, later confirmed by multiple sources, so we’re very confident this photo is real. We’ll find out in a few hours anyway. (more…)

The new MacBook Pros are approaching the rumored February 24th release date, with several retailers sold out  and various Apple online stores reporting shipments within 3-5 business days — a timeframe that plays very well with the Thursday, Feb. 24th rumors. BGR has posted some interesting details on the new models, which will come in five different SKUs as previously reported and will be lighter at around a half-pound less than the current generation. BGR also claims the new MBPs will have bigger glass trackpads.

The curious tidbit, however, is about a hard drive / SSD combo that would allow the new MacBook Pros to store the OS on the faster solid state disks and load everything else straight off the regular (and perhaps very large in capacity) drive:

The next bit of information doesn’t quite make sense to us, but we have been told the OS on the laptops will be loaded to a separate (internal) 8-16GB SSD while everything else will remain on the regular hard drive. There will be options for just SSD drives but the base models will feature regular hard disks with the SSD combo for the OS.

The rumor is interesting because it replicates what many users have been doing over the years to achieve a faster OS and still manage to store hundreds of GBs of media on their computers: install the OS on a small internal SSD, offload media and apps on a second internal (spinning) hard drive. It’s not a full SSD setup, but it has worked well for thousands of Mac users in the past years.

Does this make sense to you? Personally, I think I will go with the single (and more expensive) SSD option, but this could be a good move to introduce SSD in the MacBook Pros without increasing costs for the base models and yet provide a full-featured SSD option for those who want the speed and efficiency of solid state.

I stumbled upon Space Gremlin for Mac today when browsing new releases and top paid categories in the Mac App Store. Not as sexy and shiny as Daisy Disk, Space Gremlin can scan any drive connected to your Mac (external, internal Mac HD, network drive through AirPort Extreme station) and provide an easy solution to visualize files that are eating space on your computer.

Space Gremlin doesn’t allow you to delete files and folders in-app like Daisy Disk does with the recent 2.0 update, however it comes with a more standard grid view that reminds me of the popular cleaning tool WinDirStat for Windows. From this grid view (scan took a few seconds on my 120 GB SSD), you can select folders to reveal them in Finder, navigate to deeper levels, zoom back and hide free space / hidden files. What’s cool is that you can also add specific folders (like system ones) to an ignore list because you know they’re there and you can’t delete them. You can access and modify the ignore list at any time from the toolbar, which also happens to have buttons to refresh folders and perform a new scan. I really, really appreciate the fact that, together with my FireWire drive, the app also recognized the USB one attached to my AirPort extreme and shared on my local network. From the “begin a new scan” window, you also have shortcuts to popular Places like the Desktop, Documents and Applications folders.

Space Gremlin doesn’t have the most beautiful interface you’ve ever seen, but gets the job done. I would like to see the possibility to delete files within the app in a future update, and smoother animations when switching between folders in the filesystems. Overall, Space Gremlin is a well-realized utility that you can get at $3.99 in the Mac App Store.

When we lose deleted files on our hard drives we tend to think of this information as unrecoverable. On a Wednesday afternoon it’s easy to forget that those nightly cleanup scripts aren’t going to do you any favors when you’re looking to reuse some stock images for an updated web template. And those deleted music files? It turns out that you liked that dirty ol’ garage band after all. In times of panic we resort to Google and often extreme utilities to scrounge our Macs for every last bit of recoverable data possible before sifting through the garbage of unreadable file names and Quick Look previews. We not only advise that you read John Gruber’s advice on the matter and keep consistent backups, but we’ve reviewed a brand new Mac utility that’s not only free during beta, it’s really (really) slick.

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