The 160GB Imation Apollo hard drive works well, and has a strong build quality and a clean-looking caddy. It’s smart enough to produce at a meeting.

The Disgo Media Bank describes itself as a "digital video, picture and music player". It's essentially a 500GB external hard disk drive with a simplistic menu, built-in audio/video codecs and a remote control.

The LinkStation Live delivers everything you could want in a NAS drive for the home, with single drive units available in a wide range of capacities from 250GB to 1TB. Combining stylish design with reassuringly rugged build quality, the smooth and quiet-running case plays host to a fast SATA hard drive, connected via a Gigabit Ethernet port.

A slightly fiddly and time-consuming set-up procedure nevertheless gives way to a good set of features for sharing your files on a home network or across the internet

Sporting a design by Sam Hecht, whose award-winning genius was able to come up with… a black oblong that looks almost exactly like one of those £5 laptop drive cases from eBay

Chunkier than most rivals, and slower in file transfer tests (by a small margin), it's subtle, glossy surface makes it an executive-friendly unit

We’re going to say this up front: buy one of these now. We don’t care if you’ve never backed up a byte of data, or already have an existing backup regime; Time Capsule’s transparent, zero-intervention, newbie-friendly system is the best we have ever used.

An interesting design - it looks like a tiny wireless router, and sports a funky orange glow all along one side when plugged in.

Thirteen years ago, new PCs came with bulky, heavy 500MB hard drives inside. They were state of the art, and you could install the likes of Doom II and Duke Nukem 3D many times over. In 2008, things have moved on substantially. And we are now faced with a portable, external 2.5-inch hard drive from Buffalo, which has a capacity of half a terabyte. That's 500GB, 1000 times more than the internal drives of 13 years past.

Housing a standard 2.5-inch hard drive, the casing of the Iomega eGo has been designed to look like a rather stylish hip flask.

Standing proud on the desktop, the new Live version of Buffalo's LinkStation is immaculately styled and finished. In our tests, it also proved whisper-quiet in operation most of the time; the case fan only kicked in during periods of peak activity.

Backing up your personal data is an often overlooked aspect of laptop maintenance. Although high-capacity external hard drives tend to be expensive, the Packard Bell Store and Save 3500 (£130 inc. VAT) is a valuable and usable choice

It's always a good sign when your reviewer expects your product to cost more than it does. The first thing we thought when we peeled this out of its protective packaging was "this'll probably be worth about £200." In fact, it will set you back just £130

Storage prices are falling through the floor and capacities are reaching right up into the infinite. Well, not quite, but with a 300GB external 2.5-inch drive your on-the-road storage needs are pretty much catered for.

This external hard drive enclosure may be slim, but it can hold a Samsung hard drive up to 250GB. The drive inside this one is a 5,400rpm Samsung SATA HM250JI, which is one of the company's SpinPoint drives. Without boring you, it's a respectable model that runs quietly and doesn't heat up too much in this enclosure, and it runs as well as it should do for a drive of this rpm.

We've grown accustomed to portable hard drives using standard 2.5-inch laptop drives. However, the SimpleDrive comes with the most striking design we've ever seen.

You could almost hear storage manufacturers collectively rub their hands with glee when we all found out that Leopard requires external storage to run its backup utility Time Machine. Primely placed to take advantage of this and other blossoming storage needs on a Mac is Iomega, which now has a range of Mac-friendly drives for you to choose from.

Like the Maplin hard drive enclosure in our group, this Netgear SC101 comes without any hard drives fitted. You have to buy the IDE hard drive separately at a cost of around £120 per 500GB drive, although the lower-capacity drives are cheaper.

Western Digital’s My Book range is dominating the external storage market and it’s easy to see why. They’re good-looking drives with huge capacities, reliable hardware and come at a great price.

The Golden Disk has a 7,200rpm drive with 500GB capacity. From a two-year-old iMac, our 1GB test folder wrote to the Golden Disk in 52 seconds and read back in 45 seconds. That’s acceptable but not startling.

Leopard isn’t a Windows Vista-style bloatware addition that nobody actually wants – the new features in Leopard are genuinely worth the asking price

Here’s an external hard drive with a difference – the Screenplay Pro has got a built-in media player.

With its budget price tag of £90 for the 500GB model the DriveStation TurboUSB is the cheapest hard drive in this group test, but nevertheless boasts some neat features that you might expect to only see on more expensive devices.

This is the first mobile hard drive we've seen from Memorex and it's an impressive design. Available in a variety of sizes, the 80GB version costs £60 (inc. VAT), while the 160GB costs £100 (inc. VAT). To help differentiate it, you can swap the colour of the drive with different covers for different capacities.

So, think that you know what an external hard drive looks like (a brick probably springs to mind)? Then check out the new Seagate FreeAgent Pro.