Digital Home Thoughts: Hitachi Organizes Your Digital Life

"LifeStudio comes in four flavors, each with several capacities. Where "Desk" SKUs are chunky contraptions with 3.5-inch, 7200 RPM disks, the "Mobile" units have cradles with detachable 2.5-inch, 5400 RPM laptop drives. Meanwhile, "Plus" adds a $20 premium for a dockable USB key -- which makes the LifeStudio Mobile Plus 500GB we tested (above) the maximum in portability for a retail value of $139.99."

The added software that Hitachi offers looks interesting and a good step forward for helping people make sense of their digital data. Sure, there are other options out there, but having it come with your hard drive is a bonus. The one trend that I have found with hard drives, NAS devices and even netbooks that worries me is this whole online storage deal. With most new purchases, I find that most companies are looking to offer you a year of free service (nominally a few gigabytes of storage) of online storage. It is a nice gesture, but a really transparent attempt at getting you locked into their own particular service for which they can collect a nice monthly/annual fee. Manufacturers no longer seem content with hardware sales, but have moved into the regular income of a subscription based revenue source. Watch your wallet!