Strong performance and noticeably quieter than its predecessor. The Barracuda 7200.12 1TB is more than good enough for an OS drive, but also good bottomless storage for your movies and music

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

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.

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.

Seagate's latest enterprise SAS bridges the gap between performance and capacity. Surely there's a trade-off somewhere here.

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

Good value and high capacity, but performance is average

Seagate delivers a carnivorous drive, and does something to curb our fears of data loss.

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.

Up against some very tough competition, Seagate's Barracuda 7200.7 managed to take out the coveted Labs winner award this month with its fantastic attributes.

Stylish and versatile, its only drawback is the mammoth price

For those users after goliath capacity drives with fast seek and access times, there's the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 Plus.

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.

Great design, but average performance lets it down.

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

Seagate's Freeagent series of external drives look stunning and perform admirably.

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

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.

Several manufacturers this month have sought to distinguish their products through design. None, however, has gone so far as Seagate to challenge our expectations of an external hard disk.

750GB of storage. Backups may be problem.