设计作品: Hitachi's dockable LifeStudio drive and li'l USB buddy

Over the years, the form factor of external hard drives has been whittled down into increasingly smaller, simple bricks; now, for better or worse, comes a more complicated form from Hitachi in their LifeStudio drive.

The brick is still there, but now it's got a dock to slide into, and a little "friend" in the form of a removeable USB key if you just want to carry around (and in my case, potentially lose) a smaller percentage of the files.

The drive's designers have also gone beyond the physical form to incorporate a software package that displays your media in an on-screen 3D interface (on your computer monitor, not the drive itself).