A tad pricey but a well-built desktop DAS appliance with plenty of fault-tolerant storage and top performance

Hitachi’s ingeniously hinged screwdriver is your flexible friend when it comes to awkward screws and looks remarkably like a Halo 3 gun

Small enough to fit in your pocket but with enough power to make light work of rusty screws and flat-packed furniture

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

An inexpensive laptop that, when it comes to style and quality, more than punches above its weight

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

A decent machine with plenty of power, but it’s not earth shattering in terms of features and value.

An adequate Media Centre PC, but Asus’ competitor blows it out of the water.

Good colour reproduction at a bargain price.

Beautifully engineered and constructed, the Mac Pro is also the fastest PC we’ve ever seen by some margin.

Blisteringly fast but expensive for the capacity

Good value and high capacity, but performance is average

A decent performer, but it struggles with small files

Huge capacity, but not very quiet or good value

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

Seriously powerful mobile gaming grunt with all the bling, from Dell. Yep, Dell.

Behemoth server and PC storage, with reliability features too.

The fundamental design of the hard drive remains unchanged since the 1960s, but smaller = better in the new age.

Hitachi’s PJ-TX10 is the monster of the group – in that it’s by far the biggest and the heaviest projector.

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.