Tech-Route

It’s always interesting seeing what manufacturers of storage solutions will do to differentiate themselves from the competition. Hard drives

, USB flash drives, secure digital cards… there’s slight permutations in the formula, in performance, but at the end of the day, little that distinguishes one model from another as far as the average consumer is concerned, save storage space
.One of the recent trends in differentiation is loading portable hard drives or flash drives with digital copies of popular movies. Samsung’s latest drive, the 500GB Smasung S2 Portable External Hard Drive, takes this route, trying to cash in on the posthumous Jacko mania by pre-loading its drive with a copy of Michael Jackson’s This Is It and timing the drive’s release with the release of the DVD and Blu-Ray versions of the movie in Europe on February 22nd.
It’s an interesting tactic, but I think hard drive manufacturers are finding that loading a hard drive or flash drive with a popular movie still only really appeals to people who happen to find themselves in the market for both storage and a DVD of that particular film at the same time. In other words, this is a very minor collector’s item that even most Jacko fans will pass up.
Still, the S2 is a solid drive, and features Samsung Auto Backup, SecretZone and SafetyKey software. There’s no price available yet, but expect This Is It to add a few bucks to the price of your standard 500GB hard drive (about $70 last time I checked).