It turns out that there are a couple ingenious hackers out there who have realized that the space your optical drive sits in is some very valuable real estate space which could easily be repurposed and filled with another hard drive. One intrepid blogger, Reid, has decided to throw his MacBook warranty out the window, removed the optical drive and replaced it with a 256 solid-state hard drive, seeing as they both run via a SATA connector. Check out his blog to see the nitty-gritty of what he did.

While Reid could have just as easily replaced the optical drive with a standard drive — did you know they make 1 TB laptop drives now? — solid state drives have many advantages over your standard drives. The flash memory inside a solid state hard drive has no moving parts, so they are more durable and last longer than your standard hard drives. Oh, and they’re FAST. How fast do you say? Reid found a seven-fold increase in speed in benchmark tests he ran.

The best part of all these shenanigans is that in the interest of bettering the human race, Reid is offering to help you trick out your laptop too. He’s posted all the instructions — be warned, there’s some soldering required — and a list of the $10 of parts you need to purchase from Amazon.com. Or for the slightly more adventurous, he’ll ship you the connector for $30. Or, if the whole performing surgery on your laptop makes you feel  a bit queasy, you can ship your laptop to him with the hard drive you want installed, and for $35 plus $14 shipping, he’ll do everything for you.

We haven’t handed our laptop over to Reid — …yet — so remember these caveats: we don’t know Reid, though we’re sure he’s a stand-up guy, so you’re shipping your precious laptop to a blogger while simultaneously voiding your warranty. That being said, comparable services on other sites run $150 plus shipping for an install alone. Granted, MCE will perform a similar service and install a brace that keeps the hard drive from banging around, which might be important if you’re not installing a SSD, but it’s still quite a bit steeper than what Reid is promising.

Either way, with optical drives in notebooks going the way of the dodo, this just may be the life saving hack that will convince us to keep our notebook around for a little while more.

That’s when this Other World Computing Mercury On-The-Go crossed the desk of the Blast Newsroom. It’s a 500GB Seagate Momentus 7200RPM drive paired with a casing designed to displace heat.

Still don’t recommend throwing it against a brick wall.

The Mercury On-The-Go’s first characteristic is that it’s dead silent. It makes almost no noise whatsoever.

Read/write time is compartable to most USB 2.0 drives.

Second, there’s an aluminum heatsink running through the length of the drive with vents allowing hot air to pass through. There are no fans, but this passive cooling outfit does keep things running smoothly. Even after a half hour of benchmarking over and over, the heatsink was lukewarm and the hard drive was running steadily fast.

How steadily fast? About 32MB/s. in USB mode, which is comparable to other drives we’ve tested. It’s not even half as fast as a good internal desktop hard drive, but it’s fast enough for bulk storage, backup, music, non HD movies and all your photos.

The triple interface — FireWire 400/800 and USB 2.0 — is a nice touch. USB is still the easiest way to go for most people, however, so that’s what we benchmark at. FireWire can be much faster, however, and the manufacturer boasts about 150MB/s speeds that we don’t think you’ll ever see unless you strip down your computer and don’t run any other applications while accessing your hard drive.

The drive is also OSX Leopard Time Machine ready, so you have that bell or whistle.

Overall, the Mercury is an excellent drive that’s fast and durable. It’s an ideal storage upgrade situation.

The only x-factor is the cost, which will run you upwards of $200, when you can buy a 500GB drive for much less nowadays.

By the way: Because of incorrect information provided to Blast, we reported that an eSATA version was available, but that product has been canceled and is not available.

Until now, Hitachi has only manufactured the hard drives inside your computers, but after acquiring Fabrik, Hitachi has announced a new line of external HDDs. The first, the SimpleTOUGH is a ruggedized HDD wrapped in rubber to protect it from up to three meter drops, water,  or — like the Hitachi rep we spoke with did — if you drive your neighbor’s one ton truck over it. The unit still manages to remain sleek though, which is no small feat.

The other HDD Hitachi announced is the SimpleDRIVE Mini, a small — as in size, not capacity — HDD that’s designed with making backups simple and painless. The drives come in multiple colors come with free backup software for users, as well as 2 GB of online “cloud” storage. Both drives come in 250, 320, and 500 GB sizes for various prices.

On top of these two big announcements, Hitachi also dropped this little gem: the SimpleNET USB/NAS adapter turns any USB device into a networked drive. While it’s not quite capable of streaming HD video, the device can still move files about efficiently from any USB drive, no matter the formatting of the device, useful in our Windows/OS X mixed computing home and office. Hitachi is also openly attracting hackers by installing SHFS server utility which allows any intrepid hacker to edit the underlying Linux code on the device. It’s a simple device now, but who knows what it could become.

These are solid products for Hitachi’s entrance into the HDD market. Hitachi will be expanding their product line over the coming months, rebuilding it so that the entire product line will be new by 2010. While HDDs may not generate a ton of excitement, it’s good to see a big name with quality products enter the market.

The eGo series comes in a range of sizes expected for a portable hard drive, between 250GB and 500GB. Iomega promises that the devices can survive falls of over four feet, which is quite decent, though I wouldn’t decide to test these limits on purpose. The devices are USB 2.0 powered, meaning you don’t have to carry around another power brick.

Iomega also included some nifty extras; the device comes with download instructions for McAfee VirusScan Plus to guard against viruses and malware (obviously useless to OS X users), a few backup utilities (slightly redundant for OS X users who know what Time Machine is), and a 2BG cloud storage with MozyHome. An extra all users can appreciate is a Y-shaped USB splitter that frees up the USB port that the hard drive is plugged into.

These are certainly great dad and grad gift ideas; they’re neat looking tools in a neat package.

The Iomega eGo Patriots edition is decked out with the team logo above a 2.5″ 250 GB hard drive.

The tiny drive is a USB 2.0 product and retails for $129.99 at local retailers including Staples, the Patriots ProShop, and online at Patriots.com.

The eGo also comes with EMC’s Retrospect Express HD backup software, which allows automatic and on-demand backups of your files and drives. It works with Windows and Mac computers.

I’m working on another one of my Globe Tests articles for the Boston Sunday Globe business section, where I get to do what I normally do: play with fun toys.

Last time, it was computer mice, and the Globe and Blast saw something like 12 computer mouse reviews as a result.

The WD My Passport Studio maxed out at 32.7 MB/sec, which is admirable.

This time, it’s portable hard drives.

One of the drives that my story will feature is the Western Digital My Passport Elite, a delicious, beautiful 2.5-inch 500 gigabyte USB 2.0 hard drive with a soft, leathery finish  and a 5-year warranty.

One of the drives that didn’t make it into the story, however, is the WD My Passport Studio, another 2.5-inch 500 GB hard drive, only this one is formatted for Mac and supports FireWire 400 and 800 for faster data movement.

We test drives with HD Tune Pro 3.10. The two drives are virtually identical on USB 2.0 mode.

The My Passport Elite was just as good, really

The Studio tested just a little bit faster, but that could easily just have been random background interference. For all intents and purposes, the Studio is an elite with Firewire and Mac-formatting, and that’s really yummy (yeah I didn’t have dinner tonight, I’m hungry) for video folks, graphic designers, photographers, etc., because 500 GB is just a sick amount of data (today). I don’t care who you are.

The Studio is formatted HFS+ Journaled, and it  supports Apple Time Machine

The only major difference: the My Passport Studio doesn’t have the Soft-touch Finish. What gives WD? You couldn’t leather this one up too?

It’s important to note that while they’re small and possibly edible, these are still hard drives — rotating metal discs and lots of moving parts. Just because they’re small doesn’t mean they’re iPod Nano’s. They’re designed to be packed up and move around but I wouldn’t go jogging with one in my pocket.

Both drives have lighted capacity indicators showing you how full the drive is, which is useful if you plug it into a server and are doing automatic backups.

Both drives also are 100 percent powered by the computer you plug it into — no external power supply required.

By the way, 500 GB can hold 220 hours of DVD video, 125,000 MP3s, or 142,000 high-resolution photos.

Please look out for my Globe Tests column this Sunday in the Boston Globe Money & Careers section or Boston.com/Business!