Iomega Releases Portable Drive for Consoles

By Nick Mokey Published April 16, 2008

Iomega Releases Portable Drive for Consoles — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Since plenty of next-gen consoles end up connected to HDTV sets in a family’s main TV viewing area, they hold plenty of potential as home entertainment systems. But unless users can easily get content to them, there’s not a whole lot to show. Iomega attempted to solve this problem on Thursday with the release of the Media Xporter drive, an external USB drive tailored especially for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

While standard USB hard drives can be reformatted to work with either system, the Media Xporter saves users the hassle and the potential for hardware incompatibilities stemming from power usage, since it’s already been tested to work natively with both. Iomega also includes software tools for converting movie files that consoles won’t recognize, such as QuickTime, AVI and VOB files, into MPEG-4 files that they can play.

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After filling the drive up with media from a computer, users can connect the drive to either console with a USB 2.0 “Y” cable to view photos, listen to music, and watch videos. “A game console can run an entire media library,” said Ralf San Jose, Iomega’s global product manager for HDD products, in a statement.

The Media Xporter drive is available immediately through Iomega for $113.95.

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