For a portable hard drive to be truly portable, it needs to be able to be powered totally by the USB port on your computer. That means that users don’t need an AC adapter for the drive to operate. When portable hard drives first started to hit the market most of them needed an AC adapter and some larger capacity portable drives still do.

Today Memorex launched a new line of portable hard drives available in 160GB, 250GB, and 320GB that are all powered by the USB port of a user’s computer. The line is called the Essential TravelDrive series and uses 2.5-inch drives inside a case designed to fit inside a purse or laptop bag.

I am a DVR nut and record everything — even if I plan to watch it right then. I like to let the show get about 15 minutes ahead of live TV so I can skip all of the commercials. I also have kids so we tend to collect gobs of Dora episodes as well. When we start running out of space on the DVR, everyone gets nervous that their programs will be deleted.

Hitachi has announced some new hard drives that are aimed at the DVR user in its CinemaStar line. The more interesting of the two new drives is the CinemaStar 7K1000.B. This drive has a massive 1TB storage capacity and can hold 247 hours of MPEG-4 encoded HD video and support ten simultaneous data streams. My pathetic DVR drive can only hold 30 hours of HD programs.

Every time I think I have enough storage space in my computer, I end up needing more. My movie library or photo library grows and I add more video games and before I know it I need more storage.

Seagate announced a new HDD today that would be hard to fill up. The new Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive has 1.5TB of storage space. The 500GB growth from the previous capacity leading 1TB is the largest increase in 50-years according to Seagate.

Computer users have different reasons for wanting to protect the data on their hard drives. The reason can be hiding your ripped music stash from RIAA or protecting confidential information for your business. Whatever the reason, Addonics has a new hard drive enclosure that will do the trick.

The Addonics Diamond Cipher Hard Drive Kit retails for $139 and can protect the data stored on the drive (which isn’t included) with 256-bit AES encryption. AES 256-bit encryption is strong enough for use by the government on Top Secret documents that would cause “exceptionally grave damage” to the country if lost or stolen.