Boost the capacity of your computer and your tablet or smartphone with this wireless hard drive.

The Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt is a sturdy, portable and attractive hard drive that uses Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 speeds.

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

A shock-resistant external hard drive with large capacity

1TB of USB 3.0 storage in this slim external hard drive

This space-saving dock come external hard drive has many tricks up its sleeve

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.

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.

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.

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 a big, hefty drive weighing in at a whopping 5.8kg. The reason is that the chunky case holds no fewer than four separate hard drives equalling 1TB in size, which you can configure in various different modes via the USB connection.

On the surface, this looks like any other external 120GB hard drive designed for the mobile user. Simply plug it in, allow Windows or the Mac OS to locate it and you have a large capacity drive to back up all your files

Buffalo is no stranger to network-attached storage, or NAS devices. It's been pushing such storage for several years now; while it's not the most well-known name around, Buffalo is the world's leading manufacturer of these devices

The amount of digital media we store is constantly changing and growing. With the advent of high-definition video, it is only going to get bigger. So, it makes sense to invest in an external storage

When lack of storage is a problem, instead of wedging the traditional internal drive into your fixed desktop PC, you could get many additional benefits by using an external box loaded with extra capacity