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If you're looking for a PC upgrade that will have a dramatic effect, then nothing will deliver quite such immediately obvious results as swapping a tired old hard drive for a modern, speedy replacement.

Boot times should fall dramatically, for instance. Your system startup is heavily dependent on your hard drive as Windows and your apps are loaded into RAM, and moving to a solid state drive could see your PC fire up in half the time that it does now.

Apps will launch more quickly, too. Anything that makes heavy use of the drive will run faster; you should find it easier to run multiple applications at the same time; and if you're currently short on hard drive space, then a 1TB drive (1,000 GB) could be yours from under £50.

There are a whole host of affordable hard drives around, too. Which one is best for you? It all depends on your needs.

Performance

If you'd like your new drive to be both spacious and fast then the best option is to buy a conventional hard drive. The capacity of whatever you're looking at will be plain, but performance is less obvious, however there are several indicators you can look for that will give you a general idea.

Mechanical hard drives store data on platters, for instance, circular discs that rotate at high speed. The quicker they spin, the faster the drive is likely to be. A few 3.5" desktop drives have spindle speeds of 5,400 rpm; most run at 7,200 rpm for better performance; some work at 10,000 rpm, usually delivering great speeds but at significantly higher cost.

Another factor is the "areal density" used by a drive, the amount of data it can squeeze onto a platter. The higher this is, the more data a drive can read or write for a given mechanical movement, and the faster it is likely to be.

To compare the areal density of drives, just check their specification and divide capacity by the number of platters. So most 2TB hard drives use four platters, for instance, 500GB per platter; but Samsung's new EcoGreen F4EG requires only three platters, each holding 667MB, giving it a natural performance advantage.

Hard drives will also have an amount of cache memory (typically 32MB although 64MB caches are becoming more common), where they store frequently required data. It's quicker to fetch information from cache than the platter, so the more memory a drive has, the better.

And every drive has a host of low-level statistics surrounding it, but a particularly important one to check is the seek time, the average time it takes for the drive heads to move to a required location. As with all of these comparisons, a lower seek time doesn't guarantee better performance - it's not as simple as that - but it will give you a general indicator of how fast the drive should be.

The 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black can be yours for under £70

Read our Western Digital Caviar Black review

The Western Digital Caviar Green is a conventional hard drive with a very exceptional capacity, an amazing 2TB

Read our Western Digital Caviar Green review

Solid State Drives

If performance is your absolute highest priority, then you may want to forget about old-style mechanical technology and buy a solid state drive (SSD), instead. This replaces the spinning platters with fast flash memory, which has all kinds of advantages.

There's no annoying seek-time delays, for example. A fast 7,200rpm drive might take 13ms to locate a particular item of data, but an SSD should be closer to 0.1ms.

Read and write speeds are also faster, though not to such a dramatic extent. (You probably won't see any real-life task run much more than twice the speed it did before.)

SSDs are also silent, generally use less power, and also run much cooler than hard drives, so you may find your system fan doesn't have to spin quite so hard, or often.

Sounds great, right? But there are problems. Flash memory is relatively expensive, which means SSDs typically have low capacities and high prices. You can buy a standard 1TB hard drive for under £50, for instance: a much smaller 120GB SSD will typically cost you £200 to £300, so perhaps six times the price.

And SSDs have shorter lives, too - the memory effectively wears out with repeated use. There are technologies to minimise this, and you shouldn't see any issues for years, but it's still a concern.

If you can afford one, though, a quality SSD is definitely worth buying. Install Windows and a few important applications on it, leave everything else on a regular hard drive and you'll still notice the difference - it's the perfect addition to a power PC.

To compare SSDs for performance, look for figures like maximum read and write speeds, maximum sustained write speeds, perhaps the number of IOPS (input/ output operations per second). SSDs are particularly prone to odd controller issues, though, so in-depth testing of a drive is essential to find out how it really behaves. Be sure to check out our hard drive reviews to discover which SSDs are worth every penny of their premium price.

The Kingston SSDNow V Series 30GB drives are relatively cheap, perfect for a RAID setup

Read our Kingston SSDNow V Series review

It's an incredibly fast SSD, but the OCZ Vertex 2 delivered only 120GB for a launch price of £264

Read our OCZ Vertex 2 review

Read our group test of the 12 best solid state drives

Interface issues

Whatever you're buying, it's important to consider the drive's interface, how it connects to your PC.

If your PC is a few years old then it may only support the IDE interface - bad news, as it's now obsolete. There are still a few compatible drives available, so an upgrade should be possible, but you won't be able to use the latest technology: IDE just isn't fast enough.

More modern PCs and drives use the speedier Serial ATA (SATA) interface, instead, but this comes in three main versions. The first (SATA I, or 150) could handle speeds of up to 1.5 Mbps; the second (SATA II, or SATA II), by far the most commonplace today, supports 3 Gbps; the very latest (SATA III, or SATA 600), appearing on many new motherboards, supports 6 Gbps.

If you have SATA 150 (check your system documentation), then you'll be able to connect drives using the other standards, but there's little point - you won't get the full performance benefit.

If you have SATA 300, like most people, then you've a huge amount of choice. Look for an SATA 300 or 600/ 6 Gbps drive that provides support for TRIM (a performance-boosting command built into Windows 7 and available in other tools) and native command queuing (a technology that optimises read/ write commands to improve speeds).

If you have SATA 600, then it still currently makes sense to use SATA 300 drives, especially of the regular mechanical variety. Most can't take any advantage of the extra 6 Gbps bandwidth.

Should you be looking at high-end SSDs, though, it may be a different story. They can deliver significant burst speeds and should benefit from the newer interface. Look for SSDs supporting SATA 6Gbps to allow the best possible performance, and check the controller, too: Marvell and SandForce controllers are some of the fastest around.

Powerful SandForce controllers help many OCZ SSDs to deliver the best possible performance

Read our OCZ Agility review

Crucial's RealSSD C300 128GB is so fast that it'll benefit from running on an SATA 6Gbps PC

Read our Crucial RealSSD C300 review

Comparison complications

Buying a hard drive on capacity alone is simple. As soon as you factor in performance, though, life becomes very much more complicated.

We've pointed you at some of the issues you need to consider, for instance, and they'll give you a general idea of how a drive will perform, but there are no guarantees.

Consider drive A, for instance: SATA 6 GBps, seek time of 13ms, 64MB cache. It should be faster than drive B, SATA 3 Gbps, seek time of 15 Mbps and a 32MB cache, right? But this won't always be the case, because there are all kinds of other issues, like the choice and implementation of the drive controller, that can't be compared in any simple way.

There's no substitute for reading the views of an expert who's tried out a drive in a variety of real-life situations, then, and that's exactly what you'll get on our review pages. So by all means use your own comparisons to produce a shortlist of likely drives, but after that, head off to our hard drive reviews section for the low-down on which models really deliver.

There are hundreds of drives out there - let our SSD reviews help you to identify the best deals

Seagate's Momentus XT 500GB is part mechanical drive, part SSD. How does it perform? Check our review

Read our Seagate Momentus XT 500GB review

Looking for an external drive? Read our group test of six 2TB monsters

LaCie has unveiled its smallest 1TB hard drive in metal - with the LaCie Rikiki Go measuring 155mm.

The drive features an embedded USB 2.0 cable, a simplified software suite and an additional 10GB of Wuala Secure Online Storage.

"We are thrilled to introduce 1TB capacity in this ultra-small, durable form factor," said Quitterie Lescarret, Consumer Product Manager, LaCie.

Quickly and dependably

"Today's on-the-go consumers need to access vital media quickly and dependably," they added.

With its industry-leading capacity, Rikiki Go provides users with the ultimate data storage and mobility, at a competitive price."

The LaCie Rikiki Go is available in 500GB and 1TB and has a UK price of £89.90

G.Skill has announced a new range of Phoenix Pro solid state drives.

The SSDs are being produced in 40GB, 80Gb and 160GB flavours – the first two looking a decent option for a boot drive.

''After impressing the G.Skill engineering team, the extremely high performance of the Phoenix Pro 40GB drives in RAID 0 offers the ultimate price : performance package, along with the additional benefits of SSDs.'' said Benson Chun, Senior Product Manager at G.Skill.

Three-year warranty

"The benchmark result shows the impressive performance of two Phoenix Pro 40GB drives in RAID 0," he continues.

The drives come with a three-year warranty, although we have not yet managed to get a UK release date or price.

To find out, we've gathered 12 of the best solid state drives known to man. More importantly, our so-solid dozen includes examples of every one of the key SSD drive controllers currently on the market.

But first, a bit of history. SSD flash drives were supposed to be the final piece of the solid state puzzle. The last significant component to make the shift from moving parts to solid silicon. We could kiss goodbye to silly spinning platters and say hello to the kind of storage performance that was on a par with the rest of the PC platform.

Unfortunately, it didn't happen that way. The early days of solid state drives were a sad story of suckage. When the first vaguely affordable drives rocked up a couple of years ago, they seemed slick enough out of the box – but they had problems in the way they read and wrote data.

It was a bit of a downer, especially as they cost the earth. Since then, things have gradually improved. Thanks to new technologies, such as the TRIM command in Windows 7, the long-term performance of most drives is definitely on the up.

What's more, capacities have been growing and prices falling. All of which begs the obvious question: are SSDs now fit for mainstream consumption?

Make no mistake, it's the controller chipset more than any other component in an SSD that defines its performance and longevity. In that context, the identity of the drive manufacturer is less critical.

As you'd expect, we have established controller favourites from the likes of Intel, Samsung and Indilinx. We also take our first look at the much-hyped Sandforce SF-1200 controller, a chip that promises massive sequential performance, speedy random access and long legs. But can it really deliver on all three counts?

And that's not all. Courtesy of Crucial's C300 drive, we can add a new Marvell chip to the mix. Not all that much is known about Marvell's latest in terms of detailed specifications. However, in a way, the number of channels, the cache quantities and all that jazz don't matter. What does count is how well the thing actually performs. Roll on the benchmarks…

1. Kingston SSDNow V Series 30GB

Judging the performance and reliability of SSDs is tricky at the best of times. However, if you want even more punishment, may we suggest you add RAID to the mix? It adds yet another layer of complexity.

For the record, and despite a recent Intel motherboard update, our best information is that the TRIM command is not supported for SSDs in RAID arrays. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Read the full Kingston SSDNow V Series review

2. OCZ Onyx 32GB

When it comes to affordable SSDs, the latest fashion is towards the tiny. In that context, OCZ's new Onyx 32GB drive is as trendy as they come. But is it so small that you'd have to be a style victim to buy it?

Very probably, yes. Fully formatted, you're left with 29.7GB of storage. That sounds like a reasonable result for a 32GB drive. At least, it does until you observe how much remains after a full install of Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.

Read the full OCZ Onyx 32GB review

3. Intel X25-V 40GB

Fancy Intel's second generation SSD tech at a third the price of its flagship 160GB? Yes please. After all, Intel's current controller chipset technology is one of the few proven to maintain decent performance over time.

In fact, our test X25-V drive has been knocking about PCF towers for some time. But, courtesy of support for the Windows 7 TRIM command, not to mention a quick buff-and-format treatment prior to testing, it's not far off box-fresh performance.

Read the full Intel X25-V 40GB review

4. Corsair Nova V64 64GB

What are your minimum requirements for an SSD? We know what ours are. First, we'd like a controller chipset that not only delivers good performance but keeps doing so for longer than a few weeks.

Next, we want enough space for our operating system of choice and our favourite apps. We definitely don't want to shunt application installs onto a secondary drive.

Finally, we'd rather not flog Granny to the glue factory to pay for it. At first glance, Corsair's latest budget-orientated drive nails the lot.

Read the full Corsair Nova review

5. Kingston SSDNow V+ SERIES 128GB

As Admiral Adama once said to Colonel Tigh, context matters. Shortly after that, the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series lost the plot. But the great pockmarked one did have a point. Taken out of context, £230 is a lot for any individual item of PC kit.

But for a 128GB SSD, it's cheap. It's important to get your expectations calibrated before you consider this one. If you want a drive of this size and the best in solid state performance, you'll need to pay a bit more.

Read the full Kingston SSDNow V+ review

6. Corsair P128 128GB

With the snazzy new Force F100 drive and its zippy Sandforce controller slotting in as Corsair's new performance SSD in the 100GB-ish segment, is the end nigh for the 128GB P128?

Probably – but until it disappears, the P128 has plenty to offer. For starters, it's conspicuously better value than its in-house cousin and not simply in terms of capacity.

Read the full Corsair P128 review

7. Patriot Torqx 128GB

For the history of the SSD condensed into a single drive, look no further than Patriot's Torqx 128GB. It's been around for the better part of a year and, like the broader SSD category, it's been a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs.

At launch, we had high hopes for the Torqx thanks to its Indilinx Barefoot controller. Various claims were made regarding the power of the Barefoot's ARMbased CPU.

Read the full Patriot Torqx review

8. Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB

Along with the two Sandforce-based drives from OCZ and Corsair, Crucial's latest falls into what we'd call the fourth generation SSD category. Benefiting from all the lessons learned during the dodgy early days of SSD engineering, it's literally the latest technology.

The fact that Crucial still managed to cock things up early on with the RealSSD C300 just goes to show how difficult it is to knock up a decent solid state drive.

Read the full Crucial RealSSD review

9. Corsair Force F100 100GB

At any moment in the history of the solid state drives, there's always been an "it" SSD controller chipset – a controller that turns heads and generally dominates the news.

First came the JMicron, famous for all the wrong reasons, then Intel shook the industry with a new controller majoring on maximum I/O ops and random performance. Indilinx followed with the Barefoot controller that was competitive on both price and performance.

Read the full Corsair Force F100 review

10. OCZ Vertex 2 100GB

Does OCZ's Vertex 2 smell familiar? It should do. After all, it boasts the same 100GB capacity as the Corsair Force F100. More importantly, it's the second SSD in our group to pack the impressive new Sandforce SF-1200 controller chipset. But which is better?

As Harry Hill would say, there's only one way to find out. Fight! Actually, you need only make a price comparison and then conclude in favour of the Corsair. Right? Not so fast.

Read the full OCZ Vertex 2 review

11. Intel X25-M G2 160GB

When Intel decides to take on a technological challenge, it doesn't arse about. Nope, it crushes the problem with military force. However, with Intel's might also comes a lumbering clumsiness.

On occasion, you can see the massive bureaucracy struggle to change direction in response to events. So it was with Intel's early SSDs, which suffered from rapidly degrading performance.

Read the full Intel X25-M review

12. Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue 128GB

Disruptive new technologies tend to make established players look flat-footed. So it was that a small Californian company called Tesla beat mighty and historic brands including Porsche and Ferrari to market with the first pukka electric sports car.

It's the same story when it comes to SSDs. A dozen drives from seven manufacturers make up our Supertest this month, but only the SiliconEdge Blue comes from a traditional hard drive maker, namely Western Digital.

Read the full Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue review

Testing SSDs is probably the toughest job in tech journalism today. That's partly because although SSDs are solid, they're not completely static. Their performance can and does vary with use.

More than other components, the gap between synthetic test results and real-world performance can also be enormous when it comes to these drives. For those reasons, we recommend care when drawing firm conclusions from the results published here.

That's not to say the numbers below don't provide a useful insight into what you'll get for your money, rather that focusing on a figure – such as 4k random performance – could put you off what's actually a very effective SSD. So, with all that in mind, here are the numbers.

Indexing the benches

Judging SSD performance is a tricky business, as it's not just all about the individual results for particular tests, but the overall picture. So we created a pair of indexes to help sort the dream drives from the not-so-solid duds.

The bang-for-buck index combines a drive's performance in our application installation test with its cost. Of course, capacity also counts, so we've also added the storage size of each drive to the bang-for-buck index to create an overall metric of performance, value and capacity.

And the winner is...

First the bad news. SSDs are still too expensive. For that reason, the biggest drive on test clocks in at 160GB. Drives in the 200GB and up category remain irrelevant. We haven't bothered to include them because they cost stupid money. It's that simple.

That single, but significant, caveat aside, we're feeling more upbeat about solid state storage than ever. Unlike previous SSD groupies, not one of this month's models exhibited any noticeable lag or stutter. With the possible exception of some of the smaller drives, therefore, they'd all make a great upgrade over that antediluvian magnetic platter humming away inside your PC.

On a similar general note, the subjective experience these drives deliver doesn't square precisely with the benchmark results. That's true both in comparison to each other and with our standard hard drive. What the benchies don't capture is the responsiveness and agility of the SSDs.

You're never left waiting for a platter to spin up or the read head to change tack. Also, don't forget that the sort of instant and catastrophic failure that occasionally bricks a conventional hard drive is almost unheard of in SSD circles.

It's time, then, for the prizes. In the 30GB to 40GB range, we'll give Intel the nod. Not only does the X25-V have a significant advantage in terms of 4k random performance, but the extra seven or eight GB of capacity could make the difference between having just enough space and the tedium of constantly shunting software on and off the drive.

Further up the scale, the competition is extremely close. The next drive to grab our attention is OCZ's Nova V64. It's double the price of the smallest drives, but then it's also twice as large and therefore much more realistic as an all-purpose boot drive. The Nova is pretty quick, too, thanks to an Indilinx controller.

As for the final honours, it's an incredibly tight contest. You can make a strong case for nearly all the 100GB-plus models tested. The two drives with the new Sandforce controller are certainly screamers, but first prize goes to Kingston's less exotic SSDNow V+ Series.

Significantly cheaper than the competition, the V+ comes close enough in our real world app tests that we doubt you'd actually feel the benefit of a more expensive drive. It's the end-user experience, not numbers in a benchmark spreadsheet, that counts.

Two terabytes. That's a scary amount of data. Ten years ago, if you'd told us you'd be able to fit 2TB on a hard disk drive, our heads would have exploded. Yet there are now thousands of 2TB drives on the market, each with their own pros, cons and price tags.

We've yet to see 2.5-inch 2TB drives enclosed in external USB cases, but they're around the corner. So for the time being, all the drives reveiwed here are 3.5-inch blighters, ranging in size from pocketable to pocketable if your pocket is the size of a small reservoir.

Being bigger hard drives, they also draw more power, which means USB can't generate enough lightning juice to keep them running. So they all come with external plugs, which can be rather annoying to carry around, and even more annoying when the manufacturers insist on only sending Europlugs with them.

There are a couple of emergent features we've seen on external drives over the past couple of years. eSata is an external variant of the hard drive connectors within your PC, and enables you to plug a drive in and get faster read and write speeds. USB 3.0 has also been with us for a few months, and although it hasn't proved humungously popular as of yet, it's still finding its feet. We've included one of each of these in our Roundup.

We tested by copying a huge 4.55GB folder containing an HD movie and some pictures and music to each drive, and timing how long it took. We also ran the usual array of HD Tach and Atto Disk Benchmark, which put our drives through their paces.

For drives with eSata and USB 3.0, we tested twice: once with USB 2.0, and once with whichever other interface they happened to be sporting.

The results signalled that, other than the exciting new interfaces, there's very little difference between the drives. In fact a couple even featured the same Samsung hard drives packed in different clothes, and they gave very similar results.

If performance is going to be the same across the board, it all comes down to price and extra features. Manufacturers are increasingly selling their hard drives with lots of pre-installed software, most of which does exactly the same things Windows does natively. Plug in, turn on, and drop out.

Iomega Prestige - £149

Web: www.iomega.com

There's no turning back now; we're lost in the world of mediocre external hard drives. It's like that scene from Apocalypse Now, only instead of heading up river to find Brando, we've just found a massive platter spinning in a thoroughly unexciting fashion.

To be fair, the Prestige is quite nice looking, even if it does feature the same brushed-metal finish as the FreeAgent Desk. As with the FreeAgent Desk, it can be vertically mounted thanks to a cheap plastic stand – which defeats the point of a nice brushed-metal finish.

When something's main selling point is that it can be vertically mounted and you're writing about it, it does make you wonder where you've gone wrong with your life. It's also more compact than the FreeAgent Desk, but it does cost about £15 more.

The USB cable supplied with it has a nice black finish, and is quite flexible. I liked the plug, too.

As you may have guessed, performance is exactly the same as all the others, give or take, ooh, a couple of milliseconds on the random access speeds.

Verdict: 49%

Lacie Hard Disk Max Quadra - £180

Web: www.lacie.com

Unlike all the other drives in our test, LaCie's lovely-looking big black box actually includes two 1TB drives. "That's cheating!" I hear you cry, but cleverly LaCie has included a wee switch on the back that lets you switch between RAID 0 and 1.

This means your data is either written more quickly, or copied across both drives. It's a smart idea, and one of the few RAID implementations we've seen that doesn't involve hours of digging around in your BIOS to set up.

In addition, LaCie has included just about every connector you can think of, apart from USB 3.0, although we're sure we'll see it in a future iteration of this drive. There's the humble old USB 2.0 connector, a pair of FireWire (ask your grandparents) sockets, and, crucially, an eSata port, which gave us the fastest file transfer times of any drive in our test.

It's hugely impressive, and if you've got an eSata port that actually works, it might be worth investing in. Bear in mind that it's huge and weighty, though, so it's better for backups than as a portable drive.

Verdict: 91%

Western Digital My Book Elite - £127

Web: www.wdc.com

Where would we be without electronic ink? We wouldn't have ebook readers for one. And, er, we wouldn't have this Western Digital drive, which includes an electronic ink display on the chassis.

It's actually a really useful feature: it lets you see how much space you've got left on the drive, and it can be configured to show how many of a certain type of file is saved on there.

It's a shame, then, that the My Book Elite performed so poorly, especially when it came to the time it took to copy a file.

We liked everything else about Western Digital's drive, from the rugged-feeling design to the non-irritating backup software and the nice, handy label. If Western Digital brings out a USB 3.0 version – and it looks like the US company will – then it'll definitely be worth considering. Until that happens, it's best avoided; unless you fancy some electronic ink label action.

Verdict: 67%

Verbatim External Hard Drive - £130

Web: www.verbatim.com

Two terabytes is a lot of data, and the advantage is that you can back up huge files to it. We're not talking wimpy MP3 collections, we're talking manly, huge, uncompressed HD video files of bears pulling satellites out of space that weigh in at a terabyte each.

So we're not entirely sure what Verbatim was thinking when its drive came pre-formatted in FAT32. You know: the FAT32 that only accepts maximum file transfers of 4GB.

Having reformatted the drive to the rugged and handsome NTFS file system, the Verbatim drive performed remarkably well. Admittedly, its plasticised looks side a little too much towards the pedestrian, and the blinding LED at the front doesn't help unless you're lost at sea.

Importantly, though, it's a drive that does the job, and it's not badly priced. Just remember to format it as soon as you take it out of the box. It takes us back to the days of 3.5-inch floppies. Retro!

Verdict: 82%

Seagate FreeAgent Desk - £134

Web: www.seagate.com

With its brushed-metal finish and sleek design, the FreeAgent Desk looks like something you'd see coupled to a Mac, rather than a PC.

The fact is that its performance is pretty much the same as all the other USB 2.0 drives in our test, so I'm just going to rant about how much I hate stuff that looks like it should be coupled with a Mac.

For one, it's unnecessarily big. It looks more like something you'd use to wedge open a door on the Death Star. We much prefer things to be square and free of useless extra bits, no matter how sleek they look.

Then there's the brushed-metal finish, which just screams "I can't buy anything that isn't coated in brushed-metal, even my brogues are brushed-metal." Even the words brushed-metal irritate me.

The FreeAgent Desk can be side-mounted thanks to an incredibly cheap plastic stand, but so can lots of things, like dogs and cars. Maybe I'm being too harsh on the FreeAgent Desk, but I do absolutely hate it for no reason other than the way it looks. I'm an external hard drive racist.

Verdict: 53%

Freecom Hard Drive XS 3.0 - £176

Web: www.freecom.com

As its name suggests, the Freecom Hard Drive XS 3.0 is USB 3.0-enabled. It's also the smallest drive in our test, only ever so slightly bigger than a naked 3.5-inch hard drive, but you've still got the fairly huge power supply to lug around with you.

The rubberised coating makes it feel nice and solid, so if you drop it whilst you're being chased out of PC World by the security guards you don't have to worry about it breaking.

We do hate the thick rubber, though, it's like nails down a blackboard. Horrible rubber nails down a horrible rubber blackboard. The USB 3.0 actually works, though, and we got really decent file transfer and burst speed results from it.

If you're one of the lucky few that already has USB 3.0 on their PC, it's well worth spending the extra £40 over the other drives in our tests, and it even performed well as a USB 2.0 drive, being on par with the best dedicated USB 2.0 drives.

Impressive performance, depressing rubber coating. Worth it if you don't fancy the desk-hogging LaCie option.

Verdict: 90%

PNY technologies has announced new Optima 64GB and 128GB external solid state drives.

PNY says that the drives are designed for multi-purpose use and suggests that they are ideal for the 'computer user on the go'.

"A leading brand in both the PC upgrade and Flash memory markets, PNY aims to give its clients the best cross-market offer possible," stated Jonathan Filleau,marketing manager of consumer products EMEA at PNY Technologies.

Meet their needs

"With PNY's SSDs, each user will find an application that perfectly meets their needs – the product is of real value to our customers," he added.

A 256 GB version of the drive will be available 'shortly' says PNY, with both the 64 and 128 GB versions on sale now.

The UK pricing for the drives is £125 for the 64GB Optima SSD and £235 for the 128GB flavour.

Corsair has announced three new additions to its popular Force Series family of solid state drives, including a 40GB version that is being pitched as an ideal Windows 7 boot drive.

Corsair's Force Series offered 60GB, 120GB and 240GB, but the company has now expanded the range with three new storage options.

Those include 40GB and 80GB SSDs and a 160GB model, offering a broad range for differing uses.

Boot it around

The speed of solid state makes it an ideal option for a Windows 7 boot drive, and 40GB should offer a speedy route to your desktop and would handy paired with a bigger storage drive.

"Unlike most other current generation solid-state drives, the unique architecture of the SF-1200 SSD Processor allows lower capacity drives to perform with nearly the same performance as larger capacity SSDs," explains Corsair.

"All three Force Series models support the TRIM command, so write performance is maintained over time."

Although we are still chasing a UK price, the US prices are $130, for the 40GB, $230 for the 80GB and $449 for the 160GB version.

That would equate to £85, £150 and £295, but add on the usual cross-the-pond fee to that when the drives hit the UK release date of August.

Seagate has unveiled its GoFlex Home network attached storage – making it easy to share your files throughout your home without a complicated set up.

The Seagate GoFlex Home NAS is compatible with Apple Time Machine as well as Windows and MacOSX and can wirelessly stream to DLNA compatible devices.

"When this easy-to-use device is connected to a wireless router, an entire household can centrally store, easily access and continuously back up files wirelessly from both Windows and Mac OS X operating systems on the home network," explains Seagate.

Two versions

The GoFlex home storage is available in 1TB and 2TB versions, and the drive can be upgraded by simply unplugging the existing HDD and plugging in a new GoFlex Desk hard drive.

"With broadband and home networks reaching higher levels of penetration and operating at higher speeds, consumers are increasingly downloading and streaming content into their home and wanting to access that content from anywhere," said Darcy Clarkson, Seagate vice president of Retail Sales and Marketing.

"The GoFlex Home system makes it easy for families wanting to quickly and effortlessly backup, enjoy, and share their favourite home movies music or photos from any room in the house.

"We spent a lot of time focusing on simplicity with this product and believe people will find it very intuitive to set-up and get started.

"With the GoFlex Home system, now home networking is within reach for today's digital households."

The GoFlex network storage system is on sale now with a suggested retail price of £129.99 for 1TB and £189.99 for 2TB.

Seagate unveiled the world's first 3TB external drive this week – the FreeAgent GoFlex Desk.

Packing a peerless 3TB into the GoFlex's chassis, Seagate has created the capacious hard-disk device "to meet the explosive worldwide demand for digital content storage in both the home and the office".

To give 3TB a little bit of context, the GoFlex Desk will house 120 HD movies, 1,500 video games, thousands of photos or countless hours of digital music. Which is pretty impressive.

Terabyte me

As anyone knows, however, it's not the size of the thing that counts but what you can do with it.

Luckily the GoFlex Desk has some interesting functionality, including a USB 2.0 interface that can be adapted to be USB 3.0 or FireWire 800 connection and compatibility with both Windows or Mac OS X.

Speaking about the device, Dave Mosley, Seagate executive vice president of sales and marketing, said: "Seagate has a tradition of designing products that break into new storage frontiers to meet customer requirements and the 3TB GoFlex Desk external drive is no exception – delivering the highest-capacity storage solution available today."

With a black 3.5-inch design that sits either vertically or horizontally, the FreeAgent GoFlex Desk is available now from www.seagate.com.

Blame it on the terrorists, blame it on the media or blame it on the identity thieves, but life today seems like paranoia central. We're always looking over our shoulder for the next mugging or murder. So what's the best way of protecting yourself?

Beyond banning all liquids from your household, the next best thing to do is invest in one of these puppies: a hard-nut locking USB safe. Guaranteed to store your data until all of its outer defences are rendered useless, this is a magic little box that'll keep your darkest secrets safe and sound with just the twist of a key.

You might say surely encryption would work better? But who trusts something they can't see? That's almost as bad as the terrorists themselves. No, put your faith in a good old-fashion turning key – what can possibly go wrong?

It's something of a silly project, as effectively you are better off using someone like www.truecrypt.org to protect your sensitive data on both portable and fixed drives. But we like the idiocy of having a huge, lockable box on the desk.

If you've got a spare USB flash drive and USB cable, then you can put this together for just the price of the switch and box. Ideally you'll also need a double-pole-single-throw (DPST) switch as we'll be disconnecting both the data connections.

What you will need

Small USB thumb drive
USB extension cable or USB socket and plug with cable
Locking switch DPST
Plastic box

1. We're going to turn this little pile of rubbish into a locking USB drive.

2. For kicks we're using an old mini-BTX PSU. If you're using a plastic box you'll need to size it up for holes.

3. At this point we were expecting to drill a 20mm hole for the switch, but as it happens the cable outlet was a perfect fit.

4. Here you'll need to cut the USB cable and feed the external end through a suitable hole into your case.

5. Trim and tin both ends of the USB cable. Ideally you need a DPST switch, and to solder the data wires (green and white) to the suitable terminal, so these are cut when the switch is off – rather than the red and black power cables.

6. For security and safety, tie off the cable within the box so that it can't be yanked out.

7. Now you can fit the switch – although you might need to do this before soldering, depending on the construction.

8. At this point you'll probably want to attach your USB drive and test everything works.

9. Now we're just going to screw up the box and leave it at that. For real security madness you could fill it up with expanding foam or silicon and glue the enclosure together.

10. The finished article. We like.

USB sticks are key to how we use our PCs these days. If you want to shift some huge pictures or videos around, then the best option is to throw them on a USB stick.

Need to backup your most important documents? USB stick. Game saves and even games (we're staying firmly on the right side of the law here)? USB stick. You get the idea.

USB stick are small, spacious and incredibly versatile. We use them in the office all the time, for moving everything from screenshots to benchmark suites. And each of us has several smaller drives littering our desks.

Surely a bigger drive is the solution here? Well, yes, that's exactly what we need. Not all drives are created equal though. Some are bigger, faster and cheaper than others, while many ship with all manner of gadgets, utilities and little extras that purport to make them easier or safer to use.

And as boring as it may be, safety is one of those things that hangs around removable storage like a bad smell (especially if you work for a government agency). If, for instance, you have a bunch of personal photos or financial details on your pendrive, and you leave it on the train, then there's a good chance that anyone who picks it up is going to be able to get an eyeful.

The trick with security, especially with something as versatile as this, is that it needs to be as unobtrusive as possible, while still protecting you. We've looked at the security options of each drive we've looked at, and rated them accordingly.

In order to test these USB drives we've used two synthetic benchmarks – the venerable HDTach and the equally taxing ATTO Disk Benchmark. Both of these are available for free download from www.simplisoftware.com and www.attotech.com respectively, so you can bench your current pendrives to see how they compare.

We've backed up these synthetic tests with real world timings, copying across a variety of files and then averaging out the times to get a real write speed.

And to make it easy to see which drives offer the best value for money, we've also shown the price per gigabyte of each of the drives we've tested.

Let's test...

Corsair Flash Voyager GT 64GB
£151.92
Web: www.corsair.com
Shop: www.scan.co.uk

The GT is a rung lower than the all-out performance GTR range, but is slightly more affordable. It's close though – the GTR spin is only £15 more.

But what does that £15 saving and a slight change in hue equate to in performance terms? Read performance is only marginally slower; it's the writes that take the brunt of the savings; taking almost half as long again to copy across our test data.

As with the GTR, this is a rugged drive that will last you and the sheer amount of capacity on offer should appeal to anyone that wants to shift around large images and media files.

Rating: 71

Corsair Flash Voyager GTR 32GB
£86.76
Web: www.corsair.com
Shop: www.ebuyer.com

The GTR range is Corsair's high-performance family, which quotes 28MB/s writes and 34MB/s reads. In testing we saw figures not far off those numbers, with the real-world test being equal first among the USB drives.

Corsair hasn't thrown in software that you'll never use, but it has included a USB extension cable and a lanyard for those that need to wear pendrives as jewellery.

Build quality is a definite plus, although the price Corsair is asking is a little over the odds, despite the strong performance and build quality, especially in light of eSATA drives.

Rating: 86

Sandisk Ultra Backup USB 64GB
£149.99
Web: www.sandisk.co.uk
Shop: www.expansys.com

How do you use your USB pendrive? Do you slot it into a spare USB slot and drag files onto it using Windows Explorer?

In SanDisk's eyes that's so last year, and in regard to backing up, clicking the small button on the drive is definitely the way it should be done. It works well, although for us old hands, Explorer is still the way to go.

It's a natty little drive; physically at least. The USB connector slides out of harm's way easily, and the overall build quality is good – lending an impression of sturdiness to it.

The one downside is that it's only slightly cheaper than the Corsair GT 64GB model, yet is noticeably slower in read and write performance. It took around a minute to copy our test data across, while the faster drives here are capable of doing the same in half that time.

Rating: 80

Transcend JetFlash 620 32GB
£78.90
Web: www.transcend-uk.com
Shop: www.transcend-uk.com

The JetFlash 620 boasts integrated 256-bit AES encryption, which means your data is going to be nighon impossible to hack if it does fall into the wrong hands.

Unlike other pendrives that simply password protect the files, the JetFlash 620 creates a whole password protected partition, which does make the whole process of copying files around much easier. If you don't need this level of protection, then the 600 series is slightly cheaper, but effectively the same drive.

In raw performance terms, the drive turned in a good score, producing results only a little behind the Corsair GTR and Verbatim.

And while the drive isn't protected by a rubber sheath, the build quality, size and choice of materials make it a pleasant drive. It's not the fastest or the cheapest, but it's secure.

Rating: 82

Verbatim 32GB eSATA/USB Combo SSD
£91.22
Web: www.verbatim-europe.co.uk
Shop: www.aprmedia.co.uk

We love eSATA for the simple fact that it's much faster than USB 2.0. In testing, this unit was almost twice as fast when used in its eSATA form and easily the fastest drive here.

We do find eSATA a little hit and miss though. One of our test rigs refused to see this drive in eSATA mode even when we used the fugly power cable included. Thankfully this is a fast blighter when plugged in the other way round too, making it a tempting choice for any performance junkie.

The build quality is a little uninspiring; its cheap plastic shell hardly instils confidence. The white thumb rest enables you to switch between eSATA and USB 2.0 modes, but we'd prefer no-moving parts.

Verbatim's included a copy of EasyLock, but since this is only a 30-day trial, upgrading will set you back a shade over a tenner. But Verbatim's main problem is that the versatile OCZ Throttle can be had for £15 less and turns in similar results.

Rating: 82

Freecom Databar 16GB USB
£26.64
Web: www.freecom.com
Shop: www.cclonline.com

Freecom's entry is from the no-thrills school of hard storage, boasting the simplest of black oblong styling punctuated by a single green LED and the Freecom logo. If you're keen to show off your technology, then you're going to be hard-pressed here.

Freecom has included the Carry it Easy app on the drive, used to store your browser bookmarks and cache. You can also auto-sync your My Documents folder, encrypting it if you'd prefer.

The performance isn't impressive – producing the lowest read results in our synthetic tests, and only marginally better write speeds. In our real-world tests the results weren't quite so bleak, but its still in the trailing pack.

What the DataBar does offer is a reasonable price per gigabyte, paying a shade under £27 for the 16GB version could just about make sense.

Rating: 68

Kingston DataTraveler 410 32GB
£75.83
Web: www.ec.kingston.com
Shop: www.lambda-tek.com

Unlike the majority of pendrives in this group test, which tend to favour plastic cases, the DataTraveler 410 boasts a metal sleeve, which swings pleasingly over that fragile USB connector while on the go.

The bundled SecureTraveler software enables you to partition part of the drive for secure storage, in the same way that Transcend JetFlash does, although here Kingston benefits from a simpler interface.

Like the price per GB, this drive sits in the middle of the table – nothing to shout about, but you won't be overly annoyed by it either.

Overall, this is a rounded offering that could benefi t from either more competitive pricing or faster performance.

Rating: 80

PNY Attache 32GB
£52.46
Web: www.pny.com
Shop: www.cbccomputers.com

If you're looking for funky tools to secure your data, then you're better off looking elsewhere.

What the Attache does offer is middle of the pack performance at a better than average price per GB, rolling in just behind the budget focused Freecom drive in value terms, but beating it hands down when it comes to throughput.

Having said that, it's not an out and out performance option – 16MB/s real-world performance can't compete with the likes of the Corsair.

The sleeve swings round and slides into place to protect the USB connector, although it can be a bit fiddly to retract again once you need it. The plastic is a bit fiddly too. Even so, as a value proposition, it's not a bad little drive for the cash.

Rating: 82

Victorinox Secure 16GB
£135.44
Web: www.victorinx.com
Shop: www.limitedgoods.com

If you're looking for the fastest USB pendrive money can buy, look away now. Those looking for a bargain you should move on as well.

The Victorinox pendrive is bottom of the class on both counts. What it does offer however is more tricks and tools than all the other drives here

The pendrive itself can be unclipped from its housing, and indeed it is recommended that you do so if you're looking to use the built-in fingerprint scanner to secure your data.

The supplied USB cable means that you won't break your USB ports whilst using this protection, which does make it a little less natty in the portability stakes.

It's certainly a funky looking piece of kit, but it's ageing memory tech – taking four times as long as the fastest drives to copy across data.

Rating: 69

Lexar Jumpdrive Secure II Plus 32GB
£54.16
Web: www.lexar.com
Shop: www.lambda-tek.com

The first thing that strikes you about the JumpDrive II Secure Plus 32GB is the capacity meter on the front that shows you how much space you've got left on it. It's a crude gauge, but if you're quickly trying to move data around, then instantly seeing if you've got room on your pendrive can save you precious seconds.

And you'll want to save as much time as possible with this device, as the real-world performance is slow, despite posting reasonable synthetic results.

We found the casing a little unconvincing too, flexing easily under thumb pressure. But the Lexar does offer decent value for money, at least from a price per gigabyte perspective.

We love that capacity gauge, but don't feel it's enough to lift its score.

Rating: 69

Transcend JetFlash V20 64GB
£99.71
Web: www.transcend-uk.com
Shop: www.lambda-tek.com

The second entry from Transcend covers the capacious end of the pendrive spectrum, packing a cool 64GB into a surprisingly large lozenge.

This is the kind of casing you expect from an eSATA/USB combo drive, but there's only a single USB 2.0 connector hidden behind its protective sleeve. Its bulk can make it tricky to get in some USB slots, although you could always use an extension cable in such situations.

We'll admit that it's fairly ugly then, especially when surrounded by so many svelte competitors. It is, however, a bit of a steal when it comes to value for money – the best value drive here on a cost per gigabyte level by far.

The performance is a notch down, but it's hardly a slouch – taking 42 seconds to copy across our test data. It uses Transcend's JetFlash Elite utility for protecting your data.

Overall, this is a lot of drive for not much cash, and a great overall winner.

Rating: 90 - Gold Award Winner

Everyone must have an old 3.5-inch hard drive lying around the place? Either through sheer laziness or the fear that some probing youth might find whatever incriminating video is left stored on it.

We know we've got a small mountain of the things that need to be put beyond use. So why not take one of those waiting environmental catastrophes and turn it into something that's functional and beautiful?

So while it may not be everyone's cup of tea, we like it. The stark antiseptic reflective disc, contrasted by the functional hands of a mechanical analogue timepiece. Artful.

For the mechanism we're using one of the many that are up for sale on eBay. But most hobby stores sell them for all manner of projects. The important thing is to go for a long spindle as it needs to be long enough to go through the centre of the driver platters. Ideally, you'll want hands about 50mm long with a contemporary style, though you can trim longer ones back easily enough.

The main difficulty you will discover in completing this build is removing the drive platters so the clock mechanism can be installed.

First of all the platters need to be removed so the mechanism can be installed. Second, you will need to remove any extra platters, again, so the mechanism will fit. These extra platters are usually fixed in place with star-head TORX screws and you'll find the motor itself will need to be manhandled into shape.

What you will need

3.5 HDD
Clock mechanism
TORX screwdriver set
Hammer
Hacksaw
Workmate

How to make a HDD clock

1. The main problem is getting the platters out and making sure you get a long spindle mechanism.

2. Most hard drives now use star-shaped TORX screws to perturb consumers from opening them. Thankfully, these screwdrivers are stocked by most DIY stores. Older drives may have crosshead screws.

3. Many drives conceal securing screws beneath warranty seals; check them all. With the screws removed you'll need to lever the lid off, as most have a dust-tight seal.

4. To make getting the platter out easier remove the read heads. We found the magnets surprisingly strong. Watch your fingers.

5. Remove the TORX screws from the drive platter, we found a T6 worked best. With the top removed, the platter and spacing rings will easily lift out.

6. Some HDD motors are screwed in place, easy. New ones are not, just take a hammer and a screw driver and bash the spindle out from the bottom of the drive. Under the motor will be the copper armature, pull this out with pliers.

7. You'll need to bash out the various bearings from the remaining motor assembly.

8. Cut the end of the motor assembly off, about 5mm worth, so you can screw the end section into it and have everything fit in place.

9. Screw the end-cap into the section you cut from the motor assembly and slide a left over space in place. Place a platter over the clock mechanism and bolt the end section into place.

10. Fit the whole thing into place and voilà: hard drive clock.

Everyone must have an old 3.5-inch hard drive lying around the place? Either through sheer laziness or the fear that some probing youth might find whatever incriminating video is left stored on it.

We know we've got a small mountain of the things that need to be put beyond use. So why not take one of those waiting environmental catastrophes and turn it into something that's functional and beautiful?

So while it may not be everyone's cup of tea, we like it. The stark antiseptic reflective disc, contrasted by the functional hands of a mechanical analogue timepiece. Artful.

For the mechanism we're using one of the many that are up for sale on eBay. But most hobby stores sell them for all manner of projects. The important thing is to go for a long spindle as it needs to be long enough to go through the centre of the driver platters. Ideally, you'll want hands about 50mm long with a contemporary style, though you can trim longer ones back easily enough.

The main difficulty you will discover in completing this build is removing the drive platters so the clock mechanism can be installed.

First of all the platters need to be removed so the mechanism can be installed. Second, you will need to remove any extra platters, again, so the mechanism will fit. These extra platters are usually fixed in place with star-head TORX screws and you'll find the motor itself will need to be manhandled into shape.

What you will need

3.5 HDD
Clock mechanism
TORX screwdriver set
Hammer
Hacksaw
Workmate

How to make a HDD clock

1. The main problem is getting the platters out and making sure you get a long spindle mechanism.

2. Most hard drives now use star-shaped TORX screws to perturb consumers from opening them. Thankfully, these screwdrivers are stocked by most DIY stores. Older drives may have crosshead screws.

3. Many drives conceal securing screws beneath warranty seals; check them all. With the screws removed you'll need to lever the lid off, as most have a dust-tight seal.

4. To make getting the platter out easier remove the read heads. We found the magnets surprisingly strong. Watch your fingers.

5. Remove the TORX screws from the drive platter, we found a T6 worked best. With the top removed, the platter and spacing rings will easily lift out.

6. Some HDD motors are screwed in place, easy. New ones are not, just take a hammer and a screw driver and bash the spindle out from the bottom of the drive. Under the motor will be the copper armature, pull this out with pliers.

7. You'll need to bash out the various bearings from the remaining motor assembly.

8. Cut the end of the motor assembly off, about 5mm worth, so you can screw the end section into it and have everything fit in place.

9. Screw the end-cap into the section you cut from the motor assembly and slide a left over space in place. Place a platter over the clock mechanism and bolt the end section into place.

10. Fit the whole thing into place and voilà: hard drive clock.

Seagate has confirmed it will soon offer a three terabyte 3.5-inch hard drive later in 2010, although PCs running Windows XP will apparently not be able to handle the new HDD.

Seagate reps have also explained that the launch of the new 3TB drive depends on operating system, motherboard BIOS, and RAID vendor support.

Providing all of that falls into place as planned, Senior Product Manager Barbara Craig, told Thinq that Seagate expects to launch the 3TB drive by the end of 2010.

HDD pub knowledge tip

Also note that only 64bit Windows 7, Vista, Mac OS X and "modified versions of Linux" are currently able to read drives larger than 2.1TB.

This is because the LBA (logical block addressing) standard built into the original version of DOS is not able to assign enough addresses (identifiers) to all the sections of a drive beyond 2.1TB. This is circumvented in 64bit systems by what is called a 'Long LBA'.

Remember that last sentence. Memorize it. And then say it word perfect to your mates in the pub if and when they ask you the question: "I wonder why my XP machine cannot handle anything larger than a 2.1TB hard drive?"

Sony has announced it is discontinuing manufacturing of floppy disks in Japan, ending a 29-year-old love affair with the technology.

Sony has said that a "lack of demand" – who'd have thought it? – was the main reason for ending production, which accounts for around 70 per cent market share of the storage media in Japan.

The discontinuing of disks isn't immediate with Sony announcing it will stop production in 2011.

That said the company already stopped producing floppy disks outside Japan in March this year so the writing has been on the wall for some time.

Disk jockey

Sony first began producing floppy disks way back in 1981. Its disk heyday came in 2000, when it was shipping around 47 million disks.

Since then, the rise of CDs, DVDs and more recently USB drives have seen sales shrink to 8.5 million.

Sony is one of the last companies to stop production of the floppy, effectively killing off the format it helped pioneer.

Seagate and Paramount have teamed up to offer pre-loaded movies on portable hard-drives – offering the user the chance to unlock them for around $10 (£6.50).

In a move that the more cynical among you may liken to next generation bloatware, Seagate will fill its FreeAgent Go hard drive with movies that the user will only be able to access by paying.

As a sop, the new Star Trek movie will be unlocked for your viewing pleasure..

Jump-starter for 10 (dollars)

"We have teamed up to create what we think is a unique offering that will help jumpstart the creation of digital home movie collections," said Malik Ducard, senior vice-president of Paramount Digital Entertainment, who is in charge of digital distribution in the Americas.

"This is a big step for Seagate, we believe we are addressing a real customer need to get movies and view them wherever they want," added Darcy Clarkson, Seagate's vice-president of sales and marketing.

Although we presume that the data can be overwritten should you not want to pay £6.50 for a digital movie which will, presumably, be locked to the device, it seems a slightly odd solution to encouraging people to start a digital film collection.

Currently, new movies iTunes cost around £10.99 and new releases on DVDs around £12, but with VOD becoming more prevalent costs could well fall.

Paramount has also tried a different digital solution in the past - offering a USB stick with the Star Trek movie on.

LaCie has released its latest mobile hard disk drive from tech slumber – the Rugged eSATA.

The drive has the enviable boast of being the only portable, bus-powered eSATA solution on the market – offering up fast data speeds and a chassis that's more rugged than Gerard Butler with a week's stubble.

Protect me not

The case protects the innards so much that you should be able to drop it from a height of 2.2 metres without your hokey collection of Entourage episodes becoming corrupted.

This is because the case has been constructed out of scratch-free aluminium wrapped in rubber. Transfer times are a superb 90Mbps.

The Rugged eSATA will be available in just one capacious flavour (500GB) and can be yours for the not-too-shabby price of £130.

Go to www.lacie.com/uk for more details.

The days when you could carry around all the data you needed on floppies are long gone.

Its successor, the Zip drive, has also had its day. And while USB flash drives are getting bigger and cheaper, for high-needs mobile storage, you still can't beat a portable hard drive.

A portable hard drive is based around a 2.5-inch HDD to save on size, and requires no additional power supply, drawing its power from the USB port it connects to for data transfer. In case this is insufficient, many drives include a cable enabling extra power to be drawn from a second USB port.

If you need to power an external drive from the mains, it isn't a portable drive. Although bigger – and therefore less convenient – than a solid-state USB flash drive, the portable hard drive offers several key advantages.

On a pound-per-GB ratio, portable HDDs are by far the cheapest way to carry around large amounts of data, and they're available in sizes of up to 1TB, which should be enough for even the most demanding user.

In the following group test, we compared six 500GB portable drives from leading manufacturers, rating them for speed, portability, features, bundled extras and, of course, value for money.

The candidates

Buffalo MiniStation Lite £77

Freecom ToughDrive Custom SE £141

Iomega eGo Portable Hard Drive £107

LaCie Little Disk £120

Seagate FreeAgent Go for Mac £143

Western Digital My Passport Studio £115

We compare the drives' aesthetics and construction

Freecom's ToughDrive Custom SE comes with six coloured, rubberised sleeves, as well as a clear one to use with the bundled art decals.

The Seagate FreeAgent Go for Mac is particularly attractive, with a brushed metal finish and LEDs that light up the 'snowstorm' pattern at the back of the drive.

Western Digital's My Passport Studio features the company's famous book-like design. It includes a slider to cover the ports when in transit and an LED capacity gauge that gives a rough idea of how full the drive is.

The Iomega eGo Portable has a lovely red finish, but a slightly odd shape. The bundled USB cable has two heads, so you can take up an extra USB port for additional power if required.

We're less impressed by LaCie's effort, though, which picks up fingerprints very easily and has a cap that looks vulnerable to getting lost.

Only the LaCie and Seagate drives can be stood on their edge, so bear this in mind if that's important to you.

Testing each drive using its fastest connection

For this test, we use the fastest connection method offered by each drive, with speed-boosting software installed where available. It reflects the speeds you're likely to achieve on your own Mac, taking advantage of speed-enhancing factors such as FireWire and bundled turbo drivers.

Using benchmarking utility QuickBench 4, we assess each drive's random and sequential read and write speeds, taking the standard average times to transfer files of between 4K and 1MB.

For both of our speed tests the drives are connected directly to the Mac, not through a hub or extension; we use the drive cables supplied.

Unsurprisingly, the FireWire 800 is fastest, with Western Digital's turbo drivers giving it the edge over the Iomega and Seagate models.

LaCie's FireWire 400 connection keeps it ahead of the USB-only drives. The Buffalo's turbo drivers are not yet Snow Leopard-compatible, and make little difference to its speed. The Freecom is bare USB-only.

Via USB connection, minus any turbo software

The chances are you want something you can use to transfer data between your Mac and other computers. These secondary computers may not offer FireWire, and you might not be able to install your drive's speed-enhancing drivers.

So for this test, we look at how well the drives perform under a nonenhanced USB connection, the lowest common denominator of external hard drive connectivity. QuickBench 4 is our test software.

The fastest drive on offer was the LaCie, with a random read speed of 11.2MB/s and a random write of 15.4MB/s.

The Buffalo drive had a slightly quicker random write speed at 15.5MB/s, but its random read of 9.6MB/s was decidedly average.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was very little to differentiate the drives in this test – all put in a performance of between 9.6 and 11.2MB/s random read speed, and 13.1 to 15.5MB/s random write speed. Sequential read and write speeds were similarly tight.

We look at the bundled applications and accessories

Full marks to Seagate here. The FreeAgent Go for Mac is bundled with a useful FireWire 800 dock, making it really convenient to connect to your computer. When you need to take it away with you, there's a handy simulated leather carry case too.

Western Digital's My Passport Studio and the LaCie Little Disk offer drawstring pouches for carriage.

The LaCie and Freecom drives include an integrated USB cable, though both (especially Freecom's) are too short. The Little Disk has a programmable shortcut button that launches an app of your choice, but this isn't yet compatible with Snow Leopard.

It also has two FW400 ports so you can daisy-chain your peripherals, though we're not sure why you'd want to with a portable drive. As mentioned elsewhere, the Buffalo and Western Digital models have turbo drivers.

The LaCie is bundled with a backup app, the Western Digital has a drive manager and the Iomega has a suite of downloadable apps.

The best performers in sub-optimal conditions

When connected directly to our iMac, as opposed to going through a hub or extension, all the drives mount without an additional USB power cable. But as some portable drives are more tolerant of indirect USB connections than others, we also try them in an unpowered hub connected to a Mac through a short USB extension cable.

If it fails, we add a USB power lead, connected to the keyboard's USB port. Not an ideal way of powering a portable HDD, of course, but the idea here is to test the drives under less-than-ideal conditions.

The Freecom passes our test with flying colours. The Buffalo and Western Digital drives lack the means of adding a USB power cable, but both mount perfectly well without one.

Iomega's and LaCie's drives fail to mount when powered solely by the USB hub, but make an appearance on the desktop when also connected to the keyboard for power. The Seagate fails, even with the secondary power source.

Which drive gives you the most bang for your buck?

For this test, we use the current price of a drive on Amazon.co.uk and assess each drive's value for money. As they're all 500GB in size, capacity isn't an issue, but it's interesting to see how the retail price correlates to the features offered.

Although we appreciate the Freecom ToughDrive Custom SE, with its integrated USB cable and interchangeable rubberised covers, it's far too expensive at more than £140. Remember, this is for a USB-only drive with no bundled software.

The Buffalo MiniStation Lite was almost as minimalistic, but at only £77, it's a bargain for a USB drive.

Seagate's FreeAgent Go for Mac is the most expensive, but you're getting a lot for your money. The convenience of having a docking station isn't to be underestimated, but whether it's worth the extra cost is up to you.

Finally, the three FireWire-and-USB drives, from Iomega, Western Digital and LaCie, are all agreeably priced at between £107 and £120.

My Passport Studio's handy, book-styled form factor means it can fit into your shirt or trouser pocket, and its bundled drawstring carry pouch is just the right size for your drive and a connectivity cable or two.

It passed our power consumption test with flying colours, mounting on the desktop even when connected through an unpowered USB hub. All in all, it's great for carrying data from computer to computer.

Although the My Passport Studio lacks a FireWire 400 socket, it comes bundled with a FireWire 400-to-800 lead, so it's effectively triple interface. Its turbo-boosted FireWire 800 connection was the clear winner in our first speed test, and while there wasn't much to differentiate the devices under bare USB, it acquitted itself very well.

Add in handy features such as a sliding port cover and an LED capacity gauge, and you have an excellent drive at an agreeable price.

Also worth a mention is Seagate's FreeAgent Go for Mac. A delicious-looking device with real style, its docking station is a boon. However, it's hard on the wallet, and performed poorly in our power consumption test.

But if you're looking for a cheap, capable USB drive with few bells and whistles, the Buffalo MiniStation Lite is ideal.

The fact that silicon chips start life as nothing more exotic than sand is amazing enough, but have you ever thought about that other important PC component, the hard disk?

Its origins couldn't be more different. The heart of a hard disk – the rotating platter where your data is stored – is made out of an exotic mix of elements including ruthenium and platinum, two of the world's rarest and most expensive metals.

Needless to say, this statement doesn't even hint at the complexity involved in transforming rare ores into gigabytes of data storage. The hard disk's high speeds of rotation and the close proximity of the head to the platter means that the processes must be carried out with the ultimate in precision and cleanliness.

Add to this the strange properties of magnetic media and the techniques required to achieve the optimum capacity, and the story of how disks are made becomes one that encompasses the fields of mining, metallurgy, chemistry, physics and involves the pinnacle of engineering and manufacturing technology.

As a whole, a hard disk is an amazing feat of electronic and mechanical engineering, but two parts – the heads and the platter – stand out for their sheer manufacturing complexity. As the part that actually stores the data, the platter is what many people consider the heart of a hard disk drive – and here we reveal the secrets of its manufacture.

Step 1: Mineral extraction and processing

Platinum is only the 70th most abundant element in the Earth's crust, making up just three parts per billion. Ruthenium comes two places lower with an abundance of only one part per billion. By way of comparison, silicon – the raw material from which microprocessors are made – accounts for around 27 per cent of the Earth's crust.

It's no surprise then that platinum is hugely expensive – today's market price is more than $1,300 per Troy ounce. Turning to ruthenium, the total annual production is just 27 tonnes, an amount that would fit in a 1.3m3 cube. Both are mined predominantly in South Africa.

Platinum is one of the noble metals, which means that it's relatively unreactive. Unlike metals such as copper – the main ores of which are compounds – platinum is normally found in its metallic form. This doesn't mean that extracting it from its ore is simple, though, as platinum is normally found mixed with other metals.

Obtaining pure platinum involves separating it from the iron, copper, gold, nickel, iridium, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium and osmium that it's invariably found with. Let's just say it's a complicated multistage chemical process that can take up to six months to complete. Fortuitously, though, the ruthenium that's also needed in disk manufacture is a by-product of the process.

A deep mine in the Bushveld Complex of South Africa might seem far-removed from a finished hard disk, and in this sense it's an ideal place to start our investigation. But we're not going to need the platinum or the ruthenium until well down the line, so for now we'll put them aside as we move to something more down to earth – and considerably more common.

Step 2: Making aluminium blanks

The manufacture of a hard disk platter starts with the fabrication of aluminium blanks, which are disks of aluminium alloy onto which the magnetic recording layer will eventually be deposited.

High-purity alloy that contains four to five per cent magnesium plus small amounts of silicon, copper, iron and zinc to give it the necessary properties is cast into an ingot weighing seven tonnes. The ingot is then heat-treated, hot-rolled and cold-rolled in multiple passes to provide a sheet of the necessary thickness (usually 0.635mm, 0.8mm, 1.0mm, 1.27mm, 1.5mm or 1.8 mm – just enough to provide adequate stability while rotating at high speed) from which the blanks will be punched.

GETTING STARTED: Hot rolling mills process aluminium ingots into thin slivers of metal from which disks will be punched

Punching takes place once the alloy sheet has been coiled into large rolls so that a single stamping process produces lots of blanks. This is then followed by a stacked annealing process to reflatten the blanks. Finally the blanks are ground to a high level of precision to achieve the necessary surface and edge finish. Bear in mind that this and all subsequent steps are carried out on both sides of the platter so that it ends up with two recording surfaces.

Step 3: NiP plating

The aluminium blanks are now precision-ground using 'stones' that are composed of PVA and which contain silicon carbide as the abrasive agent. However, even with all the care taken to produce a good finish, the surfaces of the aluminium blanks produced in Step 2 are not yet nearly perfect enough. Because there's a limit to the degree of smoothness to which aluminium alloy can be ground, the next step is to apply a hard coating that will take a better finish.

PERFECT FINISH: The soft aluminium is plated with a hard NiP layer so that it can be polished to an incredible degree of smoothness

This hard coating is an amorphous alloy of nickel and phosphorous (NiP). It's applied by an electroless process in which complex supersaturated solutions containing compounds of nickel and phosphorous react on the surface of the disk to leave the required NiP layer. This layer can now be further refined in the next step of the process.

Step 4: Precision polishing

After NiP plating, the substrate is polished in several steps using progressively finer abrasives based mostly on silicon carbide, diamond and aluminium oxide. The end result is a disk that has a roughness of less than 1Å (an Angstrom unit – 0.1nm, 0.0001μm or 0.0000001mm), which is about the size of an atom and 450 times less than the minimum size of the features in today's microprocessors.

Subsequent processes in the following steps increase the roughness to 4Å, the minimum level of surface flatness that will allow the head to fly reliably over the surface of the media with a controlled spacing of around 2nm.

Step 5: Washing and inspecting

Some manufacturers employ a conditioning step to remove any contamination that may be still present on the substrate. This involves spinning the disk and then very gently pressing a barely abrasive tape onto the surface. Then, before the magnetic data recording layers are applied, the disk is cleaned so that it's free of any particles, scratches or contaminants. This is done using wet chemical exposures to acidic and alkaline solutions, followed by mechanical scrubbing in soapy solutions and then multiple rinses in deionised water.

SHINE UP: Before the active layers are deposited on the platter, it's polished so that any roughness is within atomic dimensions

The disk is dried using a surface tension effect. Before continuing, advanced optical inspection is used to detect particles, contaminants or scratches, and any disks with such defects are rejected. The process is fully automated using optics and electronic detectors combined with smart software to identify imperfections.

Step 6: Applying a soft magnetic underlayer

The next few steps involve depositing layers of various materials with differing magnetic properties using a process called 'Sputtering' that takes place in a multi-chamber vacuum deposition tool.

The first of these layers is the soft magnetic underlayer. Otherwise known as the magnetic keeper layer, it's a good conductor of magnetic fields. This layer is unique to Perpendicular Magnetic Recording technology (see 'From LMR to PMR, overleaf) and has the result of enhancing the perpendicular field needed for writing by providing an 'image field' to the field produced by the head. The soft magnetic underlayer is made from an alloy, typically containing cobalt, nickel and iron.

DATA-STORAGE LAYERS: The application of the soft magnetic underlayer is just one of several steps that are carried out as the platter is automatically passed from one chamber to another in a vacuum deposition tool

In Western Digital's latest platters this layer takes the form of two sub-layers separated by a four-atom thick layer of ruthenium. When two ferromagnetic layers are separated by a thin layer of ruthenium, the resulting interaction between the two layers is such that energy is minimised when the magnetisation between those layers is opposite. This is known as a synthetic antiferromagnet, and the end result is a keeper layer with properties that can be finely tuned. Only a few elements are known to do this, and ruthenium has the largest effect – which is why it's used in modern hard disks.

Step 7: Adding the data storage layers

Now we come to the data-storage layers. These are made from an alloy of cobalt, chromium and platinum (CoCrPt). Cobalt is used because it has a hexagonal crystal structure, which is less symmetrical than the cubic crystal structure of other magnetic metals (such as iron and nickel). This allows the metal's crystals to be oriented in the preferred magnetisation direction, which in the case of PMR is up or down. Chromium is added to give the cobalt resistance to corrosion and reduce the interactions between grains with a consequential improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio.

Lastly, the platinum provides thermal stability, preventing data loss if the disk is subjected to external magnetic fields or heat. As with the two sub-layers that form the soft magnetic underlayer, the recording layer is composed of several sub-layers. Often thin layers of ruthenium separate these. Ruthenium also separates the soft magnetic underlayer from the recording layer, but here it performs a quite different function. Ruthenium has a hexagonal close-packed atomic structure similar to that of the CoCrPt alloy, so it's used as a nucleation layer to help orient the crystals of the magnetic grains in the required direction.

It's also used to lower the degree of magnetic exchange coupling between the hard magnetic layers to produce advanced structures such as the widely used exchange coupled composite (ECC) structures. ECCs are used to help solve the 'trilema' in which attempts to improve any of the main requirements – thermal degradation, ease of magnetic switching and signal-to-noise ration – makes the others worse.

Step 8: Adding a protective overcoat

The final stage of the deposition process is to apply a diamond-like carbon overcoat layer to provide corrosion resistance and improve its mechanical reliability. This protective layer is typically 2nm thick and is applied by ion-beam or plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition techniques. The platter is now removed from the sputter deposition chamber.

Step 9: Lubricating the platter

Next, a lubricant layer is applied to the media in one or more steps depending on design. Typically the lubricant is dissolved in a solvent and applied to the platter by pulling it at a controlled rate. The rate of evaporation of the solvent in the meniscus that forms at the liquid air interface during the pulling process and the concentration of lubricant in the solution determine the resulting thickness on the disk, which is approximately 1nm. The layer comprises advanced perfluoropolyether lubricants combined with phosphazene additives that inhibit degradation of the lubricant.

Typically the lubricant layer is partially bonded to the overcoat film and imparts durability to the head media interface system in a drive. The bonding process can be activated thermally or, more typically, by exposure to ultraviolet light. During the bonding process, cross-link chemical bonds form in the lubricant's molecular chains to limit the mobility of the lubricant. However, the top-most portion of the lubricant is left to be fully mobile.

After lubrication, a tape burnish process and then a head burnish process are used to wear out asperities (microscopic unevenness) and remove any loose particles that may remain on the surface of the platter after the sputter and lubrication processes have been completed.

Step 10: Testing and certification

The final step before the platter can take its place in a disk drive is to certify that it can pass what is referred to as a glide test. During the glide process a specially made head is 'glided' over the surface of the platter to detect any remaining asperity on the media. This process ensures that a head will be able to fl y over the surface of the disk without crashing into any projections.

FINAL TEST: The platter has to pass a glide test to make sure that the head won't crash into surface defects

If the platter passes this last step then it's deemed 'flyable' or 'prime' and after a magnetic conditioning step it's appropriately packed up and shipped to the drive factory.

The magnetic conditioning step involves exposure of the finished media to a large magnetic field in order to leave the magnetisation in the storage layer in a uniform state that will not interfere with the drive manufacturing process.

A quick look through the bus speeds and data rates available in a PC system soon tells you where there is a bottleneck: it's your hard drive. All over the board data is being shifted in gigabytes per second, but the hard drive is still doing it in megabytes.

Theoretical speeds aside, what you're probably getting is 50 to 70MB/s, tops, and you'll have to wait while it finds the data in the first place.

Hard drives have been a fundamental part of the PC for yonks. The interface has changed and capacities and speeds have marched ever onwards, but essentially its pretty much the same device that graced IBM's new-fangled computer things in 1956.

Every time it appeared as if the edge of the technology had been reached, some development or other comes along to push it further. Giant magnetoresistance heads, often cited as the first practical application of nanotechnology, came along in 2000 (and won its inventors the Nobel Prize).

In 2005, we got perpendicular recording (the magnetic regions are arranged vertically rather than end to end). All this engineering effort meant for years now data densities on the platter where growing by 100 per cent a year, without prices doing the same. Now a typical drive of 500GB or 1TB costs about £50, give or take.

All well and good but capacity ain't everything and, fast as they are, the traditional hard disk drive has a basic design, which simply cannot be made to run at the sorts of speeds the rest of your system can cope with. If sheer capacity is paramount then ye olde hard drive reigns supreme. For oomph it is time to move on.

So Solid State

Enter the cocky solid state drive to step all over the old guard, sporting no moving parts and access times a spinning disc could only dream of.

From its origins in server and racks, through USB keys, we now have solid state drives that plug straight into SATA, so you can simply plug them in and off you trot. Instead of all that moving about gubbins you've a mass of non-volatile NAND flash memory. Great stuff, problem solved.

SSDs are excellent at random reads, there's no disc head to position, it'll run a hundred times faster than its mechanical cousin with random access times of about a tenth of a millisecond versus up to 10 milli-seconds. Sequential reads run at 150 to 200MB/s, double or more that of a typical HHD. Sequential write isn't quite as impressive (more like half that of early drives but getting better now), it takes a 10,000rpm HDD drive to put up any competition here.

Rather surprisingly though, it transpires that solid state drives wear out. The floating-gate transistors can only stand so many read-write cycles: 100,000 is typically quoted. Sounds like a lot but that's not quite as much as you might think, given the number of writes made during a few hours browsing.

Don't be too scared of the limited life though, drives sold with a guaranteed 100,000 cycle life means that nearly all the little fellows will last considerably longer. Clever jiggery-pokery with the controller helps spread and minimise the load and patch over any errors too.

• Solid state drives: all you need to know

True, it won't last forever, but this is PC technology we are talking about. Capacities fall a long way short of HDD and prices per GB remain daunting: Around £100 currently secures 64GB - sufficient for a Windows installation, an application or two and some data to play about with, but that's it. You can always use a big fat hard drive as an adjunct if you insist on going mad and having loads of films, music and games on your PC (you crazy fool).

However this means two drives where we really want one. Even with larger capacities and lower prices, SSD still doesn't write fast enough and however clever you are controlling it, the NAND memory currently has a limited life.

Main memory speed is what we are really after, so why not use a drive composed of full-fat RAM in the first place? The idea dates back to the late 1970s, when discs were floppy, made grinding noises and were achingly slow.

These days you can get drives that plug straight into your SATA controller and are fitted with DRAM modules and a battery. You'll need the battery because otherwise everything evaporates when you switch off; a fundamental problem.

These things are fast, though - fast enough to virtually swamp your SATA interface, murdering all the competition; they can shift gigabytes per second and random access time is in the 0.0-something range. So, its quick.

The first snag is felt in the wallet. RAM is expensive and you'll want a ton of it. Even the biggest modules are small in the world of storage. Fill eight slots with 2GB modules and that's a painful £200 minimum, before you've bought your RAM drive (£200 and up). After all that you've still only got a 16GB drive, barely enough for Windows and a couple of friends; hardly an HDD replacement so once again we are running two drives.

Another major snagette is that to keep the data you need constant power, either an external supply, a small battery pack or some other storage to back it up (some flash RAM works well).

RAM takes a fair amount of power to keep fresh, a battery of twice the oomph of a mobile phone gives about 16 hours. If you've installed Windows then an external power pack is best. The data risk loss is unacceptable for a single drive system and limits RAM drives to the specialist role. Still, speed is alluring isn't it?

A RAM drive is currently the canine orbs of performance, hundreds of times faster than the best mechanical devices. Whack Windows on it and or use it as a scratch disc for Photoshop or other such drive intensive jobs and you get a nice bang for your (not inconsiderable) buck.

A RAM drive is a better bet than shelling out an extra couple of hundred to get the next best processor up the ladder and well worth considering if a fast PC is your bag (if it isn't you might be reading the wrong mag).

Ideal world

The latest fastest spinning HDDs remain attractive, they may get hot, consume lots of power, make a fair bit of noise, but they can shift really big blocks of data effectively and a terabyte is a terabyte after all.

Running an SSD, instead, is great for machines that aren't expected to store a ton of data, (fiddly little notebooks), and they make an excellent partner for a fat HDD in desktop. If you feel adventurous and slightly rich then adding a DDR RAM drive gives you the ultimate in performance.

We want the capacities and prices of traditional hard drives, the non-volatile nature of SSD and the pure speed of main memory RAM. Well, you can't have that, yet. But there are plenty of people toiling away to bring it to you.

There are a good dozen new memory technologies in the wings - MRAM, CBRAM, PRAM, NRAM, SONOS, TRAM, FeRAM and many more. Some use a matrix of magnets to store bits, others use ions within an electrolyte, phase changing materials or various applications of nanotechnology. The dream of some is a universal memory – a single big block of RAM replacing all storage and your main memory.

This one is a way-away yet, but we can certainly expect SSDs to start developing very quickly now and there's a lot of technology filtering down from the server market to come. Desktop drives are turning solid state. And this is a good thing.