WD MyBook Drives Now Include E-Label

Imagine an external hard drive that could show you its volume label and remaining capacity, even when it’s unplugged and sitting on a shelf somewhere. That’s what some of WD’s new MyBook Elite and MyBook Studio drives can do, using e-paper technology (just like the Amazon Kindle).

WD reports that they came across the solution (e-label) after seeing how people use multiple external hard drives; which usually includes the use of sticky labels, masking tape, etc. The “Union Jack”-style letters aren’t as easy to read as those of a dot-matrix display, but is still vastly easier to read than an old piece of masking tape as far as legibility goes. Plus, these drives can also show how much space is free, and whether the files on the drive are being encrypted with the drive’s on-board 256-bit hardware encryption system. (Better than crossing out the masking tape over and over with status updates on the drive, no doubt about it.)

All this good stuff can be on your desktop for somewhere between $150-300, depending on the capacity of the model you choose (500GB-2TB).