Just over four months on from our massive hard drive roundup (October 2002, page 74), and Serial ATA (SATA) hard disks have finally arrived. Phew.

Disk-imaging software can be put to many varied uses, and products like Drive Image prove particularly useful in our labs when upgrading to a new hard disk or for swiftly refreshing a test system.

When Symantecs Norton Ghost 2002 was released last year, it offered few improvements, with support for Windows XP the only significant addition. Not so with Drive Image 2002.

Offering 40GB of storage, the Iomega drive is very small for its capacity, measuring a mere 8.89 x 7.37 x 1.27cm. It weighs just over 99 grams, which means it's unnoticeable in your pocket. The internal drive is a 40GB Hitachi TravelStar C4K40 -- a new form-factor hard drive, measuring a mere 1.8 inches across (a normal notebook hard drive is 2.5in, a desktop drive 3.5) -- and only about 7mm thick.

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.

Why are we reviewing something that is a mere 36GB? Simple -- because this one drops access times and pumps up the transfer rate. Not targeted at the home user, the 36GB WD Raptor is marketed as an enterprise-level SATA drive -- the fastest drive on offer by WD. Capacity becomes an afterthought for the Raptor with its 10,000rpm spindle concerning itself with speed, resulting in seek times of around 5.2ms, compared to the 8.9ms of a 7,200rpm drive.

Released already in the U.S. and due out here shortly, PowerQuest has announced Version 7 of its Drive Image software. Some significant changes have been made with the latest version including plenty of sensible features for offsite data storage and time and space saving.

Samsung’s new Flash disk can extend battery life and boost performance – at a price

The Maxtor Blackarmor has one thing that other USB hard drives don’t - military grade data security in a very stylish package

At first glance, the Seagate Pocket Hard Drive appears very similar to a yo-yo in both size and mechanics. No, you won't be able to perform tricks with it, but … the attached USB cable does wrap around the device in a stringy sort of way.

Currently only available to OEMs, although it should be released later to the consumer market, Seagate’s Momentus hard drive upgrade kit is designed to boost the common bottleneck issue of hard drive performance in notebooks, tablet PCs, digital audio players and blade servers.

Blu-ray takes another tentative step towards the mass market, but is now the time to buy?

An large capacity extrenal drive that looks like something out of the Guggenheim.

Western Digital markets this drive as a special edition drive for higher performance needs, but in our labs, not only has it been beaten by all other SATA drives, but its own IDE counterpart.

Think outside the case by putting drives to work.

The Caviar WD2500JB is a big 250GB, and is one of three drives to breach the $500 mark. It is $80 cheaper than the WD2500JD SATA drive. Despite the three-year warranty, it’s not exactly great value; in fact, like the W2500JD, this drive carries a high gigabyte-per-dollar value.

This external drive has the kind of excesses and looks that made the 80s what they were.

Western Digital has announced its range of 250GB SATA laptop hard drives, and we have the first unit in the country under the microscope.

The future of storage is expensive, for now. That aside, how do Blu Ray drives compare to DVD drives?

Released already in the U.S. and due out here shortly, PowerQuest has announced Version 7 of its Drive Image software.