All but the kitchen sink
The drives will be available in ‘Mobile’ (250GB, 320GB and 500GB) or ‘Desk’ (500GB, 1TB and 2TB) flavours, as well as ‘Plus’ models for the larger two capacities in each class. The Plus models feature an integrated USB stick which connects to the drive magnetically and can sync to the drive directly through a set of recessed pins. While the thumb-drive is only 4GB, it’s actually just an adapter for a microSD card, which can be easily upgraded to 32GB.
All of the drives also come with 3GB of free cloud storage which can be accessed from anywhere through a browser or an iOS app. Should you need more space, up to 250GB of storage is on offer for $49 per year (around £39, including VAT).
Organising your “digital mess”
While the sharp design and the integrated USB key are nice features, Hitachi is hoping the real benefit to consumers is in the included LifeStudio software. Once installed, the program pulls together all of the videos, photos, music and documents it can find in local storage, as well as integrating photos from your Facebook, Flickr and Picasa accounts. All of the media is then displayed on a “3D visual wall”, which the company claims will make it easier to find and organise all of that digital media. On top of all this, the software allows users to access online TV from certain content providers, and can be set up to enable one-touch backup.
Hitachi has really thrown everything at the LifeStudio drives, and there are some genuinely good ideas here. However, the value may depend on how well the software works at integrating all of those sources and organising huge collections of media. As just an external hard-drive, they certainly look impressive, and the integrated USB stick is a nice addition. However, at $80 (around £62 including VAT) for the 250GB model and an extra $20 (£16 including VAT) over the base price for the Plus models, these drives are definitely on the high-end of the market. There’s been no indication on UK availability or pricing just yet, so we can only speculate for now, but we’ll be sure to update when we learn more.
