The My Book Thunderbolt Duo is Western Digital's first desktop drive to use an ultra-fast Thunderbolt interface.

The Buffalo DriveStation Velocity benefits from a super speedy USB 3.0 interface that puts other hard drives to shame.

This portable drive's appeal lies in its pairing with a Thunderbolt connection. Although its price tag is high in pence-per-gigabyte, it's at the more affordable end of Thunderbolt devices.

Western Digital has refreshed its My Passport Essential portable external hard drive for PCs by adding some very welcome USB 3.0 support.

If being able to upgrade your external hard drive with newer and faster ports sounds good, then the GoFlex Desk may well be your backup drive of choice.

Samsung is one of the largest manufacturers of NAND flash in the world, so you'd expect a great performance from a Samsung solid-state drive. And there's no doubt that this new model certainly delivers.

So, Intel has done the obvious thing and stuck a SandForce controller in its desktop SSDs. Could it offer the best compromise between price, performance and capacity?

It was almost inevitable that a SandForce-powered Intel drive would eventually appear. With the launch of the new Intel SSD 520 Series 240GB that day has finally come.

We looked at one of Plextor's first 6Gb/s rated drives last year (the PX-128M2S) and barely nine months later, the next generation is upon us in the shape of the M3 series.

Yes, the Zalman SSD-F1 Series 240GB is made by the same Zalman that makes all those fancy-looking CPU coolers, among other things. This actually isn't Zalman's first go at a solid state drive (SSD) range - it previously released the Zalman N series and the S series.

LaCie ramps up the performance stakes with a combined Thunderbolt and external SSD offering.

By combining a large solid-state memory cache with a regular hard drive, the Seagate Momentus XT offers a performance close to that of an SSD at a cost-per-GB that's more like a HDD.

A speedy drive that offers value for money if speed is more important that capacity

The A-Data Nobility Series N005 USB 3.0 flash drive is capable of holding a huge 32GB of data. Because it's a USB 3.0 device, when plugged into a compatible port it means transfer speeds are much zippier.

Along with AES 256-bit encryption, iStorage devices include a numeric pad for typing in a pin, for even greater security. With the iStorage datAshur USB flash drive, physical security is packed into a nicely compact device not much bigger than a lot of other USB flash drives.

The smartest of portable WD drives

The arrival of the new OCZ Octane 512GB is the most intriguing development in SSD technology in the last few years. The key theme here is high quality SSD controllers and the firmware that goes with them. They've proven very difficult to develop.

The SSD 830 isn't the quickest drive, but it deals well with incompressible data, boasts high IOPS and random read/write performance, and it's well priced. If it's as reliable as it looks, the SSD 830 will be a fine drive.

A shock-resistant external hard drive with large capacity

A wireless external hard drive for tablets and smartphones

Not just your average box full of bytes

The Vertex 3 is back with more IOPS

Recycle old internal hard drives and back up external hard drive data easily

Take your media library with you, and enjoy it on your iOS device

Professional-class SSDs don't come any quicker