Skip to main content

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

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
Brandon Widder is a multimedia journalist and a staff writer for Digital Trends where he covers technology news, how-to…
Google strikes back with an answer to OpenAI’s Sora launch
Veo 2 on VideoFX

Google's DeepMind division unveiled its second generation Veo video generation model on Monday, which can create clips up to two minutes in length and at resolutions reaching 4K quality -- that's six times the length and four times the resolution of the 20-second/1080p resolution clips Sora can generate.

Of course, those are Veo 2's theoretical upper limits. The model is currently only available on VideoFX, Google's experimental video generation platform, and its clips are capped at eight seconds and 720p resolution. VideoFX is also waitlisted, so not just anyone can log on to try Veo 2, though the company announced that it will be expanding access in the coming weeks. A Google spokesperson also noted that Veo 2 will be made available on the Vertex AI platform once the company can sufficiently scale the model's capabilities.

Read more
You can now try out ChatGPT Search for free
The ChatGPT Search icon on the prompt window

As part of its "12 Days of OpenAI" event, OpenAI has yet another update for ChatGPT, this time bringing its Search feature over to the free tier. The Google Search alternative was previously only for paid subscribers in the ChatGPT Plus or Pro tiers.

"We rolled it out for paid users about two months ago," Kevin Weil, OpenAI's chief product officer, said during Monday's livestream. "I can't imagine ChatGPT without Search now. I use it so often. I'm so excited to bring it to all of you for free starting today."

Read more
No, the Nvidia App isn’t killing your PC’s performance
The Nvidia app on the Windows desktop.

When I heard that the new Nvidia App could reduce performance by up to 15%, I was shocked. If this is the first you're hearing about it, I'm sure you're shocked, too. The news stems from Sebastian Castellanos, who posted on X about a big performance drop with the Nvidia App installed in both Black Myth: Wukong and The Talos Principle 2. Some news outlets ran with the claim, including Tom's Hardware and Dark Side of Gaming, showing original testing that backed up the performance loss.

The only problem? The Nvidia App isn't to blame.

Read more