CES: Storage for the less-than-tech-savvy

At CES, vendors are putting their best feet forward with a variety of storage options -- including one way to get devices out of storage without pain. 

Cisco is putting a toe -- actually a few toes -- into the consumer water via such products as its Linksys Media Hub with LCD (NMH400 series). The NAS device offers two SATA drive bays (one filled with a 500 GB or 1 TB drive), remote functionality through a subscription to a Linksys service (which, after the first year, will cost users $10/year), a bright 1.8-inch LCD that guides users through the process of saving and accessing their data, and a memory card reader for direct-from-camera uploads.

The accompanying software is well-designed and allows users to access media from any device on the network; you can even create a playlist on the fly (although you can't save the playlist -- that's something for a future version). The Media Hub with LCD retails for $350 for the 500 GB version and $430 for the 1 TB version.

For those who have tech-phobic relatives who need to be able to back up their drives without calling for help, ClickFree offers portable drives and DVDs that do automatic backups with the least amount of pain -- plug them in and they immediately start, search for files, and do the backup. This year, the company is showing its Transformer USB Cable, a cable device that contains the company's firmware so that folks who already bought themselves a 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch backup disk but don't quite know how to handle it can have some help. The Transformer costs $60.

Finally, those of us who have slashed our fingers and destroyed our tempers trying to get new devices out of blister packs may have some help on the horizon. MeadWestvaco Corp. has created a packaging solution made of recyclable paperboard that is difficult-to-impossible to open -- until you make a single cut with a pair of scissors, at which point it's simple to tear away the rest of the packaging. If this, or something like this, gets adopted, this is one gadget buyer who will be extremely grateful.