Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. s

Halos’ smart hard drive lets your digital life live outside the cloud

Add as a preferred source on Google

Even the best hard drives aren’t particularly sexy, which makes it difficult for a company like Halos to make a splash at CES. They say beauty has always been in the eye of the beholder, though, and when you have a features like those unique to the company’s forthcoming CatDrive, you can be sure someone is going to pay attention.

The device, one of many Indiegogo success stories on display at CES, is designed to simplify your digital life. It’s essentially a storage device that plugs directly into your home router, and allows you to easily upload all your content — photos, videos, etc. — to a centralized location. The shockproof, 1TB drive is then accessible from anywhere using an accompanying mobile app, assuming you have a valid internet connection, giving you a quick means for syncing and sharing content across a network of devices. Best of all, unlike Google Drive and many other cloud-storage alternatives, there’s no additional fee associated with Halos’ offering.

Halos
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Centralized storage is nothing newer, however, which is why Halos decided to outfit the CatDrive with a wealth of additional features. You can quickly set up the drive to automatically back up content from your iOS or Android device, for instance, or create a private account for each member of your family, ensuring their content is kept from prying eyes. Other features, namely the device’s robust search capabilities, come standard.

Recommended Videos

The CatDrive is currently available for pre-order and will retail for $99 when it officially launches at the end of January.

Brandon Widder
Former Senior Editor, Living Articles
Brandon Widder is a multimedia journalist and a staff writer for Digital Trends where he covers technology news, how-to…
Every app on my phone has decided I need AI, and none of them bothered to ask
AI assistants are invading everything from photo libraries to messaging apps, and dismissing them only seems to guarantee they’ll return later.
Electronics, Phone, Mobile Phone

My wife doesn’t use AI very much. She isn’t philosophically opposed to it, nor is she waiting for the machines to overthrow civilization. She simply opens Google Photos because she wants to look at her photos.

Lately, however, the app keeps greeting her with invitations to try its AI tools. Google would very much like her to search her library conversationally, generate something new, or ask Gemini to edit a photo. She dismisses the prompt, gets on with her life, and eventually meets it again.

Read more
Shopping for Back-to-school? These are the gaming laptops I’d recommend
Powerful enough for AAA games, practical enough for everyday lectures, assignments, and everything in between.
oled gaming laptop

Every gamer knows the pain of trying to do too much with the wrong hardware. Back-to-School is the perfect excuse to fix that. A good gaming laptop shouldn’t just hit high frame rates -- it should also survive endless browser tabs, assignments, coding sessions, video edits, and everything else college throws at it. These five machines strike that balance better than most, which is exactly why they’d be my picks this semester.

Alienware 16 Aurora

Read more
Google’s AI just recreated the best goal ever by Pele that was never actually filmed
My heart is full after watching the clip, and it will bring tears of joy to every true football fan.
Pele footballer.

If you look at the AI landscape, a majority of its usage in the film and television industry has been pretty controversial. Bringing dead actors to life on a screen, using AI to record vintage songs that were never completed, or just using it to film scenes or handle any other part of the creative process — the backlash has been pretty vocal. But there are a few slivers of hopeful AI usage, too, and Google just delivered one of those in a heartwarming fashion using Gemini AI.

I wonder the world never archived

Read more