Hitachi has released a few storage devices today, among which the SimpleTough and SimpleDrive Mini USB drives. But the more interesting release is SimpleNet ($79), a little USB to Ethernet box that turns the SimpleTough or SimpleDrive into a network attached storage (NAS) appliance on your local network.
Fair warning: we don’t if there’s a need to install drivers or if the drive shows up as a Windows machine on the network and we don’t know if SimpleNet works with non-Hitachi drives. [press release]
Update: SimpleNet works with non-Hitachi USB drives (confirmed by Hitachi).