Western Digital Dips its USB Drives in Company e-Ink

Western Digital has added a slick new feature to its latest line of My Book Elite and Studio external hard drives. In place of the electric blue glow normally emanating from them, you now have an informative e-Ink display on the front. The display is configurable to some degree and shows the drive's label and the amount of free space available. The nicest thing about the e-Ink technology is that the display stays visible even without power. Lexar has incorporated this once on their flash drive.

The Elite and the Studio share the most of their features together. They are available in capacities of 500GB up to 2TB and have built in hardware based 256-bit AES encryption. The Elite line is made for Windows devices, and comes formatted NTFS with a USB 2.0 interface. The Studio line is geared towards Apple users, and is equipped with a Firewire 800 interface. Both ship with WD SmartWare software for drive management and display configuration. They are available now from $169.99 to $279.99 depending on capacity.