ZumoDrive Lands Deal With HP To Power Storage And Syncing On Mini Netbooks

File syncing and storage startup Zumodrive has landed a deal with Hewlett-Packard to power the technology giant’s newly announced CloudDrive on all HP Mini netbooks beginning in January 2010. HP CloudDrive, which will be powered on the backend by ZumoDrive, will allows netbook consumers to quickly and easily access their music, documents and other content onto their netbooks even if their media libraries are larger than their available on-device storage. Read our initial reviews of ZumoDrive here.

ZumoDrive, which spawned from Y Combinator startup Zecter, has a different take on file syncing. Similar to other services, ZumoDrive. which was built specifically for netbooks, tablets and other devices with low amounts of storage, creates a drive on your device that is synced to the cloud. But service has a twist-ZumoDrive tricks the file system into thinking those cloud-stored files are local, and streams them from the cloud when you open or access them.

The startup also launched a new version which lets users to access their music playlists, photo albums and document folders on any device. ZumoDrive mimics a standard hard drive but saves content in the cloud and then streams it to each device instead of saving local copies, making it the killer app for the netbook and other devices with limited storage. Its iPhone app lets users sync their content to their phone without having to deal with local storage capacity issues. And the service has also been upgraded to integrate well with media applications, like iTunes, so users can play entire music libraries saved in ZumoDrive on multiple devices without manually syncing content.

The Zumodrive-powered HP CloudDrive features the ability to stream music, videos and photos to iTunes, iPhoto, Picasa and Windows Media Player, offline access, mobile acces via the iPhone app, folder linking, playlist syncing, file sharing and tired storage options.

This is a pretty big coup for the bootstrapped Zumodrive, which just raised $1.5 million in funding last year. Zecter previously launched a product called Versionate, an office-wiki product, that we first covered in July 2007. We wrote about them again a year ago. ZumoDrive faces competition from Dropbox, SugarSync, and Box.net.