Samsung has announced three new lines of external hard disk drives, including two portable models and a desktop drive. All use the new USB 3.0 port standard, which is up to 10x faster than the current-generation USB 2.0.

Lexar has announced two new Echo flash drive models in time for CES 2011.  The Echo MX drive is a high performance thumb drive with a nice always-on capacity meter and the Echo ZX drive is a small-footprint drive meant to live in your notebook for transparent backups. Both drives feature 128-bit AES encryption and

Iomega has joined D-Link to offer a set top media player with Boxee’s software included. TV with Boxee is interesting in that not only is their a full suite of multimedia options, but they’re also offering the player as diskless and in a NAS version with 1TB and 2TB capacity options. The onboard storage is

Imation has announced new functionality for their Defender Collection software suite. New tools allow for central management, PC-based removable storage management, storage device management and encryption.

Hitachi has released two new drive families to address the DVR, IPTV STB, video surveillance and emerging hard drive-embedded TV markets. The 3.5" CinemaStar 5K2000 comes in 2TB and 1.5TB capacities, and the 2.5" CinemaStar C5K750 family with 750GB, 640GB and 500GB capacities. Both families boast low power consumption, quiet operation and special tuning for their

Lexar is getting the jump on CES and Storage Visions 2011 with the announcement of their 64GB and 128GB professional Class 10 SDXC cards. Beside the tremendous capacity, Lexar is touting the performance of these cards, a minimum transfer speed rating of 133x (20MB/s) provides quick transfer of the high-res images and HD video today’s

Intel has announced the latest extension to their SSD lineup, the Intel SSD 310. The 310 delivers X25-M performance in a tiny mSATA package designed for highly mobile applications like tablet and ultraportable notebooks. Intel is using 34nm MLC NAND and offering the 310 in both 40GB and 80GB capacities. 

While Intel and Micron have produced NAND flash memory through their IM Flash Technologies LLC joint venture, Intel has not yet invested in the venture’s new Singapore plant. Could Intel be backing out of the manufacturing and development aspect of its SSD business?

This news bits roundup covers several exciting product announcements: OWC announced its Mercury Elite-AL Pro Dual mini portable RAID solution supporting 2.5" drives; Transcend announced low-profile and half-slim SSDs for small form factor applications; lastly, HighPoint announced its RocketRAID 2700 now supports SATA port multipliers.