How much capacity and how many drives do you need? We look at a selection of storage options

Think outside the case by putting drives to work.

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.

In order to control distribution of movies and prevent piracy, many most DVDs are region protected to ensure that they cannot be played outside of their region of issue. In short, this means you can't play American DVDs on an Australian player and vice versa. To further complicate the matter, PC and notebook DVD drives are locked to the least region set with DVD drives correspondingly locked after five changes of region code by the user.

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

Monster storage; plus a choice of professional SAS or consumer SATA interfaces and reliability to boot.

if you are looking for a top performance drive with a reasonable capacity and terrific price, then the Western Digital Expert simply cannot be beaten.

The Caviar 'BB' series disks from Western Digital are designed to be good, solid mid-level drives with decent all-round performance.

The Caviar 'BB' series disks from Western Digital are designed to be good, solid mid-level drives with decent all-round performance.

The Caviar 'BB' series disks from Western Digital are designed to be good, solid mid-level drives with decent all-round performance.

One new drive, three subtle variations, all the optical drive you'll want from the current generation.

When it comes to CD-RW drives, both the Sony models in the Labs this month represent top quality and performance.

Western Digital MyBook Home Edition

The highest hard drive speed in the world -- 15,000 RPM -- is now available in a 2.5" form factor.

Another laptop hard drive series moves toward perpendicular storage.

The cheapest system to be submitted for review in our performance roundup, it just goes to show that even $4000 will get you a hell of a lot of PC for your money. PCQUEST has also opted to go with a CoolerMaster case, both for its attractive looks and functionality, this housing able to hold a massive five optical drives and four hard disk drives, erring on the side of more is better.

Expensive, but the ds209+ is very fast – the NAS to aspire to

HP gets the best out of iSCSI with a smart backup appliance that’s easy to manage and good value for small businesses.

A comprehensive set of features and good performance

With more homes served by their own wired and wireless networks, there’s no better way to store all your music, movies and documents than a NAS box like this