The Hard Drive as Eye Candy

We use external hard drives for all sorts of utilitarian purposes, backing up client computers, moving large data sets from place to place, storing computer images, and increasingly frequently as a substitute for magnetic tape media in business backup solutions.

Until now, the external hard drive case has been uniformly gray or aluminum possibly pimped out with an LED or two. No more. today's New York Times has an article about the next generation of high-concept and high mobility hard drives.

LaCie has a new drive, the d2, with an aluminum alloy case designed by Neil Poulton, a Scotsman who has also created a line of Artemide lamps. Seagate will be selling Dave, a sleek 20-gigabyte drive that connects wirelessly to cellphones for carrying photos, music and video. It is no larger than a small cellphone itself.

Strong demand for external hard drives was one of the highlights in consumer electronics last year. Americans spent $600 million on external hard drives in 2006, an increase of 53 percent over 2005, according to NPD, a market research firm. Put another way, consumers bought 739.7 million gigabytes of hard-drive storage space last year, more than 11 times as much as they did in 2003.

The need to back up all the songs, photos, videos and movies Americans hold is, of course, driving the demand. The inevitable falling prices of the hard drive compels the manufacturers to gussy up the drives in order to command a premium price, much as Apple does with its PCs or iPods.