You’d think putting together an external storage solution would be simple right? Well considering the amount of heat a hard drive throws off and the general lack of cooling most enclosures provide you might be facing some premature drive failure down the road.

Hardware Bistro has some thoughts on the Sunbeam Airbox eSATA/USB hard drive enclosure and its rather immense cooling solution which should keep even a Western Digital Raptor’s heat levels in check. A gander if you will:

Something unique about Sunbeam Airbox when compares with other external HDD enclosures is the active cooling fan which is always forgotten by other external HDD enclosure makers. This active cooling fan is a 80mm blue LED fan where its blue LED lightning can be switched on & off as not everyone will like this lightning all the time; a very caring consideration.

Don’t expect SATA 2.0 speeds out of this thing but if you’re looking to maintain an appropriate temperature for your external storage it’s as good choice.

Are you finding that 1 TB of external storage is a paltry amount of room for your data? Then Western Digital has you covered with the anything-but-svelte My Book Studio Edition II with up to 4 TB–that’s terabytesof storage.

Aimed at “creative professionals” and eco-conscious customers, the fan-less unit packs the company’s GreenPower drives for 30 percent energy savings; is pre-formatted for Mac; and supports eSATA, USB 2.0, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800.

All that for $650.

[via Gizmodo]

Since the advent of external USB storage devices, it’s been extremely easy to add storage to your computer without all of the popping open your case and cramming in the hard drive nonsense.

Western Digital’s My Book Essential Edition 1TB USB 2.0 external hard drive promises a good chunk of extra space at an extremely tempting price. There was a point in time where an external drive would set you back more than your run of the mill internal version but that price premium has slowly shrunk down to an acceptable profit-taking level.

The company touts the drive as a little eco-friendlier with up to 30% more energy efficiency than standard systems, which I take to mean competing brands that offer the same storage space using the same USB 2.0 interface.

Click the break for our full review.

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