Western Digital’s E-Ink HDDs Tell You What’s Up

It’s celebration time for people with lots of data and bad memories: Western Digital’s newest hard disk drives have E-Ink displays, telling you the name of the drive and how much storage you have left. The use of E-Ink, as opposed to an LED screen, means this information will appear regardless of whether the drive is on or off, because let’s face it, digital hard drive labels are worthless if you have to power on to see what’s on them. At that point, you might as well just peer onto the drive itself through your computer.

The E-Ink feature will be included in the My Book Elite and the My Book Studio, both USB 2.0 drives, priced for 2 TB at $280 and $300, respectively. Both drives come with Western Digital’s SmartWare backup software, password protection and data encryption. The $20 premium on the Studio is likely due to its Firewire output.

I like that HDDs are coming with cool bonus features beyond the standard capacity and read/write specs. This particular one’s a little gimmicky for my taste, and if I was going to splurge on a feature I don’t really need, I’d probably opt for complete waterproofing. Then again, I have a pretty decent memory. [via CrunchGear]