External hard drives aren’t exactly the most thrilling subject, but an awful lot of people need one. So, I recently found myself testing six drives from Western Digital, Maxtor, LaCie, Iomega, Freecom and Buffalo for our sister magazine MacFormat.

What struck me is just how much space you can get for your cash – between £70 and £80 for the lower end 500GB models and just about £120 for 1TB of storage, sometimes with one-touch backup. Bargainous.

We won’t give away who won – though the winner was itself a drive manufacturer. Several of the drives also impressed with eSATA and FireWire 800 support, but if you’re a Mac-owner wanting to buy a drive, you’d be better off in many cases buying the drives that aren’t aimed at you with their snazzy Mac-esque design – you get a raw deal in many cases.

You can read the results in issue 195 of MacFormat, hitting a shelf near you in the coming weeks…