Fabrik's SimpleTech brand initially pushed out its Pro external drives and online backup service around this time last year, but thankfully it finally figured out what we consumers want: that it keep up with the capacity curve. The firm's Duo Pro drive, which boasts four interfaces (eSATA, FireWire 400 / 800 and USB 2.0), will be available in Q4 with 3TB of room. As for its smaller sibling, you can expect the single-drive 1.5TB Pro model to land around the same time for a definitively different unknown price.

Not that we haven't seen bamboo-based gizmos before, but there's something about SimpleTech's [re]drive that just screams upscale. This elegant, smooth looking external HDD was crafted to be easy on the eyes and Mother Earth alike, with the outfit utilizing "renewable, naturally grown bamboo and recyclable aluminum" along with an Energy Star power adapter and eco-friendly packaging. You'll also find a USB 2.0 jack, automatic power up / down and 500GB of internal storage space. Not too shabby for an estimated $150.

[Via Wired]

Fabrik hit us up with a double dose of news today, so we'll get right to it. First up is the firm's new line of SimpleTech Pro / Duo Pro Drives ($229.99 to $799.99), which are aimed at digital media enthusiasts, prosumers and business users and come equipped with up to 2TB of storage space, eSATA and USB 2.0 connections. Next we're looking at the outfit's Ultimate Backup, which is hailed as "a simple, affordable and secure way to protect your most coveted content both offsite and online." For under five bucks a month, the service provides users with "unlimited capacity to securely store important files and media collections remotely and automatically," and moreover, all files are "encrypted with 128-bit SSL encryption while in transit, with an option for a private encryption key, to the company's remote 448-bit Blowfish encrypted servers (in other words, it's secure)." For more details, be sure and give the read links below a gander.

Read - SimpleTech drives
Read - Ultimate Backup service

You know how it is, five minutes ago we were not aware of our dire need for 512GB of ridiculously fast NAND storage, but it's all so clear now: there can be no substitute. SimpleTech has announced the Zeus-IOPS SSD 512GB and 256GB SSD drives, which offer up the largest flash drive capacities we're aware of in a 3.5-inch enclosure. Performance ain't no slouch either, with SimpleTech claiming 200x performance over 15,000 RPM enterprise hard drives, with better reliability to boot. SimpleTech wouldn't come clean on an exact price, but it expects prices for SSD to drop to $2 per GB by 2012, meaning that in five years you can get one of these 512 giggers for the low, low price of $1,000 -- and we're guessing around ten times that when the drive launches in Q3 2007. The 256GB is available now.

[Thanks, Kelly]

We don't often wind-tunnel test our external drive enclosures, but SimpleTech's re-released Pininfarina-designed SimpleDrive still kind of makes us want to break down to try. Now in capacities up to 1TB, the 7200rpm USB 2.0 drives come bundled with backup software, a 2GB Fabrik account (which might have had something to do with Fabrik acquiring SimpleTech's peripheral business), that inline light-up capacity meter, and your choice of colors based on capacity: red (160GB), white (250GB), sapphire (320GB), onyx (500GB) and gray (750GB and 1TB). Prices start at a hundred bones for the 160GB unit; combo FireWire 400 and USB versions will ship in May.

World's thinnest titles aren't just for cellphones and DAPs, don't you know, Solid State Drives need to shave those millimeters just as much as the next guy, and SimpleTech seems up to the task with its new 64 gigger. The 2.5-inch drive, a member of SimpleTech's Zeus SSD lineup, measures a mere 9.5mm thick (0.37-inches), compared to some competing solutions more than twice as thick, making it a solid option for squeezing into those ever-slimmer laptops. SimpleTech is currently targeting the device at high performance applications such as military, intelligence and aviation, and has apparently buffeted the drive against shock, humidity, vibration and altitude -- most of the stability naturally thanks to the flash technology, of course. No word price, but with those kind of customers, we're guessing this one won't be cheap.

We've never really felt the specific urge to have the plastic casing that houses our data be designed by a company like Pininfarina -- the same people who designed cars such as the Ferrari 575M Maranello, Jaguar XJ-S and Volvo C70. If, however, such design standards strike your fancy, SimpleTech is offering up some portable USB 2.0 drives that could do the trick. They range from the $110 40GB version to the $180 100GB version, and all spin their disks at 5400RPM with 8MB of cache.

[Via The Gadget Weblog]