I visited the suite of Phillips and Lite-On Digital Solutions (PLDS) to see the company’s Plextor and Lite-On products for the new year.
First is the eNAU608, Lite-On’s “most personalized drive”. It’s an external, slim, USB 8x DVD writer with LightScribe and LabelTag functionality. Users can swap out inserts inside the top area in order to identify the drive as theirs. They can also print their own using packaged software. The drive is available now for $59.
There’s also a less-personalized version, the eNAU108.
There’s also the eHBU212 external USB 3 12x Blu-ray drive and its internal SATA brother, the iHBS212. Both support 3D Blu-ray. They’ll be on sale in March or April for an undetermined price.
On the Plextor side (Plextor is the high end, the Infiniti to Lite-On’s Nissan), there’s the PX-LB950UE, a 12x external USB 3 and eSATA drive. This new line has been redesigned to be much quieter than its predecessors. It’ll be available at the end of February for an undetermined price.
Some other new units will be available at the end of January: PXL611U, an 8x slim DVD writer similar to the Lite-On ones previously discussed, and the LX-L890SA 24x internal DVD writer.
The PX-NAS4 is Plextor’s second generation NAS. It’s quad-bay housing supports up to 8 TB using four 2 TB drives. It has two USB ports and two eSATA ports for expansion, and has dual gigabit Ethernet ports for connectivity. It supports all of the major network filesystem protocols and runs Linux. It also sports full disk encryption. It’s been available since November for $400 sans drives.
Two other products are still in development but should be released soon.
Plextor will release in February a SATA 6 Gbps SSD for 400 MB/s read and 300 MB/s write. This is possible courtesy of the 6 Gbps SATA link. It may also be shipped with a USB 3.0 adapter dongle, and will have available for it a USB 3.0 external enclosure and a desktop mounting kit.
Lastly, Plextor showed its Wireless HDMI solution. It can transmit to up to four devices a perfect 1080p signal. There’s only a 50 ms latency, so it’s quite possible to work on one monitor, then spin around to another and work from it.
