Transcend is kicking up its pocket-size external hard drives to 500GB, the company announced Tuesday. This is the second vendor I've run into that now offers compact external hard drives of this storage size. The first was OWC, with its Mercury On-The-Go, which came out awhile ago.
The new hard drives include two models: the StoreJet 25C and the StoreJet 25M, both of which are the company's most popular external storage products.
Both models are based on 2.5-inch 5400rpm SATA internal hard drives and feature USB-only connection interfaces with bus-powered capability. These drives are compact enough. However, the StoreJet 25M is a little less compact than the StoreJet 25C, due to the fact that it features an advanced dual-stage antishock technology and meets U.S. military drop-test standards to help protect your data against accidental bumps or falls.
The new drives ship with a two-year warranty and the StoreJet elite software package, which includes Web site auto log-in, mobile favorites with no-trace Internet browsing, Secret-Zip 256-bit AES file encryption, mobile e-mail, online updates, and an intelligent backup feature that offers to schedule security file-compression functions.
You can buy the new 500GB StoreJet 25C and StoreJet 25M directly from Transcend now for around $220.