A clever, convenient little drive that you can carry around with you in your pocket.

Superb performance, quiet running and excellent value for home use, especially if you want to stream media.

A decent performer, but it struggles with small files

The 1TB box, also available in smaller, less tough sizes.

With unusual styling that looks like it came straight from a 1970s sci-fi series, Maxtor’s OneTouch Plus is a distinctive but not unattractive product.

One of the practical devices for large back up jobs are external hard drive drives, which not only offer competitive capacities, but are easily portable and perfect for offsite storage. Maxtor's OneTouch II is pitched squarely at this type of application and, as the name suggests, makes it easier with a single button for back up.

Finishing in line with the WD2000 SATA, the two jostled places and they both offer a trade off. The WD drive performs marginally better, a 0.8ms lag separating the two.

The performance of this 200GB SATA drive was average. However, despite a three-year warranty, this fell into the lower bracket when it came to value

This drive was the poorest performer in our roundup - but, as with its 200GB SATA cousin, the specifications were honest in pointing out the fact.

We were unconvinced by the orange and brown livery of Seagate’s towering desktop drive, but for the miniature version the company has toned things down. It’s still brown, but the orange glow is restricted to the front of the unit and its simple low-profile shape is far easier to like.

The Seagate ST3160021A sits second last on the performance rankings, and in the specific Sysmark and Drivespeed scores. Though it might not appear valid to compare this 7200rpm 160GB drive to the 5400rpm Maxtor 300GB hulk, you can – they both only have 2MB caches.

Good value and high capacity, but performance is average

Great performance, near-silent running and the FTP server make the Buffalo a great alternative to the Maxtor.

Huge capacity, but not very quiet or good value

The Athlon64 has only been out a short while, and although it's an excellent processor, from all accounts it's not selling as well as it should be.

High capacity, good performance and affordable. The Caviar is a great alternative to the Samsung

USB 2.0 hard disks are a convenient way of backing up your data, but if you want to share the files with other computers over a small office or home network they're not ideal. But Linksys has an alternative. The Network Storage Link (NSL) takes a USB 2.0 hard disk or flash drive and puts it on the network.

An external drive that despite being a decent performer is making Walter Gropius roll in his grave as we speak.

Behemoth server and PC storage, with reliability features too.