Sony Launches its First Line of External Drives

External hard drives are an essential for photographers on the go. They're a great way to store massive amounts of files in a safe, secure way. It's almost surprising then that Sony has only now launched its first line of external drives.

The new drive, called the HD-PG5, stores up to 500GB of data and boasts USB 3.0 connectivity. If you're using USB 2.0 you'll still get the added benefit of the Data Transfer Accelerator, which Sony says doubles the transfer rate of your data.

One of the particularly cool things about the new drive is that it doesn't even need a PC to work. Camcorders like the DCR-SX21E and DCR-SR21 can use the direct copy function to back up data directly to the drive.

The HD-PG5 launches later this month .