A growing number of hard-drive manufacturers and start-ups are touting a new use for the hoary data vault that's been one of the chief PC components for more than two decades. They want to see it used as a portable storage device for gadgets such as set-top boxes, game consoles and digital stereo receivers.
In this vision, consumers would slide drives containing music, digital photos, or recorded TV programs into an empty bay, similar to the bay on PCs that holds CD drives. Drives could also be linked to consumer-electronics devices by way of a USB 2.0 or FireWire connector.
These consumer-electronics items could also come with their own internal drives, but expansion through a portable drive would be inevitable.
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