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.

New wizards make it easier to use, and the range of operations is impressive for such a reasonable price

Think outside the case by putting drives to work.

Lacks in power, but terrific hardware design makes this an intriguing take on the Eee brand.

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

Thin, but short on features and not particularly cheap either.

Another laptop hard drive series moves toward perpendicular storage.

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.

Easily one of the cheapest 60GB hard drive cameras, but its image quality is cheap too.

Two external hard drives in lego-esque cases. One of them is worthy of our recommended stamp.

Devices that attach storage to the network aren't new, but until now they've been either very expensive or limited in ability. But this little marvel from Asus changes all that. The WL-HDD can put a hard disk on the network with no drivers or client software required, and it can do this wirelessly via 802.11g.

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.

Some interesting technology, married with superb performance – and a huge price tag.

A very fast, well-built high-end PC. But a few niggles and high price keep it off the A-List.

The TViX is a fairly small box, roughly about the same size as a good DVD box-set, but inside it's got some amazing smarts. This also technically isn't a media streamer as such - it's more a media cacher thanks to the 80GB hard drive inside.

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.

Although similar products have been available (with much controversy) in the US for a few years, the Samsung DVD-H40A is the first Personal Video Recorder (PVR) to reach our sunny shores.

If you don't care about recording to disc, you'd be better off with a TiVo. If you're looking for an all-rounder to tide you over until Blu-ray prices fall, Panasonic's DMR-XW300 has a lot to offer.

Relatively quick and cheap, but not quite up there with the best