Time was, if you bought a used 360 hard drive, you could call a toll-free number and dupe Microsoft into sending a free transfer cable. Then they got wise and charged $12. It's now a fully listed accessory, for $15.

Kingston is refreshing their line of solid state drives with the SSDNow V+. The big advantage users will see in this generation of Kingston drives is support for TRIM. This should keep these pricey drives humming along smoothly throughout their life. The new drives also come in larger sizes, all the way from 64GB up to 512GB. The SSDNow V+ will be capable of 230MB/s read and 180MB/s write.

Two companies were competing with each other and time to roll out the world's first USB 3.0 hard rive. In the end, it proved to be an anti-climax as one of those two companies, Freecom, failed to deliver the USB 3.0 hard drive that it had announced back in September. It has now pushed back the launch to next year.

Imation has announced the release of the first external hard drive to use wireless USB. The Pro WX Wireless USB hard drive packs a standard 1.5TB 3.5” drive, with an SSD upgrade kit coming soon. The transfer speed are said to be a respectable, but not great, 15 MB/sec.

The most capacious 1.8-inch hard drive on the planet now checks in at 320GB, says Toshiba, who just introduced a new line of tiny HDDs

If you’re in the market for a completely silent PC that also happens to be tiny, this is your lucky day. The Stealth LPC-395F, or “Little PC”, is a small fanless Atom-based nettop system with a front facing 2.5-inch hard drive bay.

Maybe not next year, or even the year after, but sometime in the not too distant future, mainstream storage duties are destined to make the jump from mechanical hard drives to flash-based SSDs, right? Not according to a new study published in a recent issue of IEEE Transactions on Magnetics. Not only are hard drives in it for the long haul, but the cost to storage ratio will shrink dramatically, the study suggests.

Toshiba’s $328 million acquisition of hard drive maker Fujitsu is bearing some early fruit.  The deal, made earlier this year, was an effort by Toshiba to increase it’s presence in the enterprise storage market. Toshiba acquired all of Fujitsu’s hard drive related business including design, development, manufacturing, and sales.

Seagate’s first quarter marked a reversal for the hard drive manufacturer. While overall revenues are 12 percent lower for the first quarter of 2010 than they were for the first quarter of 2009, Seagate realized a $179 million profit, up threefold from the first quarter  of 2009.

Buffalo, who has offices in Japan, USA, Germany, UK, Ireland, and Taiwan, is well on its way to being the first to release a USB 3.0 hard drive. On Tuesday, the networking and storage company said its HD-HU3 series of USB 3.0 external hard drives would be the "world's first" to ship to retailers, Engadget reports.