SmartDisk has unveiled a portable hard disk drive with an always-on display. Honestly, there are a number of portable, external hard drives in the market. Do we really need another one? While competition is good, I doubt XPress has what it takes to be a solid contender, especially considering that XPress is useless from an innovation standpoint.

Here’s the catch with the on-display “technology.” The idea is that XPress HDD is always on even when the unit is not connected to a PC or powered on. Then, it will display text in X number of lines (based on the font size) on a 240 x 160 display any information you want. For instance, it could display the drive’s content in a list, user-defined drive name and the last date data was transferred to the drive.

So what’s the point of this technology? There’s no pragmatic reason to display information, especially since the user using it is already aware of the information that FireLite XPress is capable of displaying.

The portable HDD is available in 60GB and 120GB capacities for $199.99 and $299.99, respectively.