Walking the Storage Beat

We've already covered many of the storage products on display at Macworld Expo, but here's a few more that I spotted while making my rounds on the show floor.

Verbatim is showing off a wide array of Mac products, including its latest in recordable media as well as a new line of external hard drives (some of which still bearing the name of SmartDisk, which Verbatim bought in July 2007). The new drives include Quad Interface Desktop Hard Disk Drives, available in 500GB and 1TB capacities for US$180 and $250, respectively.

Also on display are the company's new ExpressCard SSD drives, which our colleagues from PC World also spotted at CES. The solid-state drive plugs into the MacBook Pro's ExpressCard/34 slot and offer capacities of 16, 32 and 64MB ($100, $150, and $300, respectively).

Also, check out the 8GB Store 'n' Go Retractable USB Drive, a thumb drive that lets you set up freely accessible public zones as well as password protected private zones. Available in late January for $70.

It's not a storage product, but Verbatim is also showing the new TuneBoard Speaker Keyboard, which has dual stereo speakers integrated into the top of the keyboard and angled towards the user. It includes multimedia keys for tasks like fast-forwarding, muting, and volume adjustment, and also sports a built-in mini microphone. A Mac specific version is available for $70.

Back on the storage beat, Sonnet Technologies is showing its full line of ExpressCard/34 cards that offer eSATA, FireWire 800, dual CompactFlash cards, Gigabit Ethernet, and more for MacBook Pro owners. Sonnet also offers several types of RAID enclosures, including the Fusion DX 800 (priced at $3,995 and up), with eight hard drives offering RAID 6 and speeds up to 600MB per second when connected via eSATA.