In addition to the 2TB drive that rolled out today, Hitachi has announced it newest portable drives, the SimpleTough and SimpleDrive Mini. Both of these drives come as a result of Hitachi's acquisition of Fabrik, owner of the SimpleTech brand.

SimpleTough features, as its name suggests, rubberized tough shell which is water and shock resistant and will be available in 250, 320 and 500GB capacities. It uses USB 2.0 interface and has a foldable USB cable that adds a nice touch to the entire design of the SimpleTough drive. In addition to the 3-year warranty, this line of external drives comes bundled with Hitachi's Ultimate Backup online service with 2GB of free space and automatic local backups with Hitachi Local Backup feature.

The SimpleDrive Mini also uses an USB 2.0 interface but has some modern design features and will be available in red wine color for the 250GB model, blue dusk for 320GB and carbon fiber black for the 500GB model. Same as its bigger and tougher brother, this one also has both backup features and the same 3-year warranty.

In addition to these sleek looking drives, Hitachi has announced a SimpleNet USB drive network adapter which is a simple device which shares the external drive over network. It has two powered USB 2.0 ports, one 100Mbps ethernet port, small power adapter, supports FAT32, NTFS, HFS+ and EXT3 file systems and has features that can easily turn your external hard drive into iTunes server, FTP access drive, DLNA media server or SSH server.

Both the SimpleTough and SimpleDrive Mini should be available soon with a price tag of US $99.99, $119.99 and $149.99 for the 250, 320 and 500GB SimpleTough drive while the SimpleDrive is simply ten bucks cheaper at the same capacities. The SimpleNet should retail at US $79.


SimpleTough


SimpleDrive Mini


SimpleNet