We're not sure why the music industry thinks consumers want to buy even more physical media, but it can't seem to stop pumping out plastic in a futile attempt to stay relevant -- this time it's an initiative called slotMusic, announced today in partnership with SanDisk and several major retailers. The 1GB slotMusic microSD cards are preloaded with DRM-free 320kbps MP3s, and are aimed primarily at mobile phones -- the idea is that you'll be able to buy music and listen to it without having to sideload it onto your device using your computer at home. Sure, we can see the appeal of that, but when we half-facetiously asked SanDisk's reps if they expected us to carry around a stack of individual microSD albums, they didn't laugh when they said yes, and even told us that slotMusic media binders would be available at launch -- no, they weren't kidding. We're not sure anyone's going to be sold on going back to lugging around physical media with the iTunes and Zune WiFi stores out there, but it sounds like we'll be seeing quite a push for this from retailers and the labels -- and artists are apparently enthusiastic about using the full 1GB of space to include content beyond basic liner notes and cover art. We'll see when these launch around the holidays -- if we had to guess, we'd say this is just Ringles and CDVU+ part III

We've talk before the fusion IO before: it's a high-end solid state drive (SSD) designed for enterprise applications (servers). Because it is SSD-based, it has ultra-fast access time and throughput that standard disks can't touch. Unlike most SSD, it is not a drop-in replacement for a standard hard drive, it uses a PCI-E slot instead. It might appear inconvenient, but this allows the ioDrive to bypass all the limitations inherited from decades of optimizations for mechanical drives. Because it needs drivers, you cannot boot on an ioDrive, for now. This is going to change later this year with the next firmware update. ioDrive will appear in the BIOS as a "normal" drive and users will be able to use it as a boot disk. This change, along with the declining prices of flash memory could lead to a prosumer version and may be a consumer version of PCI-E based storage. We'll keep an eye on it, but we see disk performance as a critical component of a balanced PC. (io DRIVE: $3000, 8GB version)

If you're anything like us, you probably cringe every time a new USB flash drive is announced, but then the guilty pleasure takes over and you just have to look anyway. At first glance the "Recycle" from INF Import isn't much to look at, but then we figured that's kind of the point. After all, what better way to hide all your most precious and/or illicit data than in a totally bland enclosure that looks like something that chipped off your wall in the last earthquake? -- which isn't far off seeing as how it's composed of recycled newspaper. Oddly enough no storage capacity is mentioned, so lets hope your stack of worldly secrets doesn't run too large, or you may have to tile your walls with these babies.