Look at the photo of the PQI U510 - doesn't it look appealing? You can't help but be drawn to a stylish- looking drive that's the size of a credit card, weighs only 23g and is available in sizes of 1GB (£27), 2GB (£46), 4GB (£84) and 8GB (£129). We've seen one or two companies try and make card drives over the years, but nothing with a capacity this large or this build quality.

The U510's brushed metal finish looks tailor-made for a PowerBook or MacBook Pro, which is a good start.

The drive case is the same shape and size as the average credit card, and if that wasn't thin enough, there's an even thinner USB dongle that tucks away into the drive, and then extends out on a wafer-thin cable strap to meet a computer port. It's a dongle without any of the plastic housing, just the naked coupling. When it's docked, a blue light then shines from the strap to indicate that you're connected.

We transferred a bunch of 150MB files to and from the U510 drive with no problem at all. It's not the fastest drive we've seen, but it's certainly respectable. Speed isn't really an issue for this type of storage. If you were to line up 20 1GB drives at this price and time their transfer rates, you would be splitting hairs to find a winner.

Because of its delicate dongle and thin, wispy strap, it feels a bit like you're treading on eggshells whenever you dock it. We worried about whether the strap was going to take the weight of the drive as it hangs from a port. This is particularly a concern on the vertical USB port of an iMac, but less so with the horizontal ports of a Mac laptop where the drive can rest its weight on the desk.

Build quality

Previous card drives we've seen tend to suffer from two key problems when it comes to build. Firstly, and more of an issue for guys than girls: if the casing isn't hard enough, the unit will buckle and bend in your wallet the first time you forget it's in there and sit on it.

Secondly, the USB connectors can snap off. During two weeks of regular use we had no problems - helped by the fact that we didn't take it to the pub with us - but you can't chuck it about like a 1GB pen drive.

The backup software that comes with the U510 isn't Mac- compatible, but insists on letting you know it's there each time you dock it. Just click 'Ignore' in the OS X pop-up warning panel, then you can read and write to it with ease.

For the fashion-conscious owner of a brushed metal Mac laptop who's looking for portable storage, the U510 is quite a cool thing to buy. In fact, it's quite cool for anyone to buy. Everyone we showed it to thought it looked pretty smart; it certainly has that wow-factor down to a tee. James Ellerbeck

A drive burning DVDs at 18x would surely explode into a million pieces - or so we thought. Plextor's PX-760A certainly generates the sort of noise that would suggest such a catastrophe, but it's admirably shy of vibration.

If the whirring gets a bit much, Plextor has included a silent mode, which basically caps your read and write speeds to limit the noise from the motor. It's a nice touch, but it doesn't get anywhere near silent until you creep towards the 1x mark.

Unfortunately, despite assurances that our Plextor branded media could handle the pressure, we never managed to get more than a peak of 16.4x writing speed out of a single-layer disc. Not that that's a bad rate: the average across the disc was 12.05x, which is a respectable score by all accounts.

Dual-layer burning hovers around the 6x mark and we don't doubt Plextor's claims that it can produce CDs even faster than the usual 58x maximum: our test batch was burned extremely quickly.

And there's more

What you get for your money is more than just an attempt at 18x, though. Plextor's second biggest selling point for the PX-760A is its built-in AutoStrategy technology, which should ensure that you're always using the fastest possible method of writing your disk. If it doesn't find one in its database, it creates it.

Our test burns outshone a 16x drive by only a few seconds, but if that's what counts for you then you'll be happy with this drive. It certainly seems reliable, and if you're unsure of its credentials then Plextor handily includes Plextools. This is a valuable multifunction package that includes some stringent tests for your potential media.

The one inescapable problem is that you've probably already got a DVD drive that works perfectly already. For all the advanced features Plextor crams in, this is essentially nothing new.

The jump in speed is admittedly significant between older 4x burners and this young contender, even if it doesn't quite go as fast as it says on the tin. Yet you'd have to really need this to justify spending £20 more than you would on a 16x drive. Alex Cox

A portable DVD drive like this one from Plextor has obvious advantages, even for desktop users. If you only need to burn DVDs once in a while, it makes sense to get a pocket-sized drive that you can slide into a drawer when you don't need it. And when you're on the move, of course, the last thing you want is to be saddled with a desktop drive the size of a sandwich box.

However, the Plextor provides only half the answer. Yes, it's small and compact, but the obvious thing would surely have been to make it bus-powered?

As it is, the Plextor needs a mains cable and adaptor, just like all those bulky desktop drives. That might not be much of a hardship when you're working at your desk, but when you're out and about on the road it's another story.

We could probably forgive the Plextor for this if it wasn't also so darned slow. It took over six minutes to grind its way through our 500MB DVD R write test, making it slower even than the bus-powered LaCie Slim.

It struggled during our iTunes test, too, taking over seven minutes to burn an audio CD when its rivals were taking around four. While the Finder, iTunes and iDVD recognised the Plextor without difficulty, it's not labelled as a Mac-compatible drive and doesn't come with any Mac software.

Given this, things don't look good for the Plextor at all. It's a fraction cheaper than the Mac-friendly LaCie Slim, but not by enough to make it at all appealing. Worse, it's undercut by the USB 2.0 version of the LaCie drive.

At its launch, Plextor was able to boast that this was the smallest portable DVD writer on the market. However, its lack of speed and reliance on an external power supply rule it out as far as we're concerned.

You can argue about processors and hard drives until you're blue in the face, but what really matters in a media centre is purely superficial. It's got to look fantastic if you're putting it near your TV, and it's got to make the least noise possible. Foxconn has both bases covered with this diminutive aluminium model, which ambitiously offers quiet (though not fanless) heat pipe processor cooling and a goodlooking perforated case.

It comes well equipped, with everything bar your CPU, memory and hard drive included in the dinky case. This includes a preinstalled notebook-sized DVD/CD-RW drive and a memory card reader that's quickly becoming a ubiquitous PC accessory.

Some of the hardware positioning is a bit difficult to manage, as you'll find when you come to try and force the CPU cooling elements into their tiny allocated space, or when you have to unscrew the bottom of the case to install your SATA hard drive. The 200W PSU also resides outside the case, both for space and heat reasons.

The Tuckaway is not really a multipurpose case, because its lack of height means there's room for only one card via a custom riser, and even that's only a bog-standard PCI. This is perfect for a TV card, but this means you can forget about upgrading to a modern 3D card, and while the onboard Intel 915 is fine for video playback and general desktop use, it's easily taxed by gaming. With the amount of heat this box generates, you probably wouldn't want to add the extra warmth of a video card, anyway.

Up against the Shuttle XPS (pretty much the leader in the mini-PC field) the Tuckaway doesn't fare too badly. Admittedly, the Tuckaway goes in lacking a number of the more frivolous features of the Shuttle, like its LCD screens and such. It even misses some otherwise crucial things such as an AGP slot, but it comes out fighting thanks to its flatter form factor, which has slightly more living room potential than its more boxy competitors.

As long as you're happy with a PC that you're really going to struggle to upgrade, you can be confident in your purchase. At the price this is an impressive combination of kit, and it looks the business, too.

Iomega made itself an industry-standard name with its Jaz and Zip drives. Like these groundbreaking devices, the more recent REV introduction is based on small, convenient cartridges that you can buy on an ad hoc basis, but utilises hard disk technology within each cartridge for fast data transfer.

Spoiling you for choice, The REV drive is available both as an external device, in either USB2 or SCSI flavours, and as an internally mounted drive, with SCSI, ATAPI or SATA interfaces. Iomega sent an external SCSI model as our review sample, although the USB2 version is a little smaller and cheaper. Build quality is robust and the finish is both stylish and neat, although the need for a separate power supply adds an element of clutter.

The 35GB cartridges for the REV are eminently portable, weighing in at 75g and measuring about 75x75mm and 8mm tall and they're not exactly cheap, costing about £35 each.

As with the HP StorageWorks DAT backup solution, compression plays a major role in Iomega's strategy with the REV, which is why cartridges are labelled as 35GB/90GB, with an asterisk after the second figure. However, the compression element of the supporting Iomega Automatic Backup Pro software works well, making automatic, scheduled backups a doddle.

One of the things that made the Zip drive such a success was its ubiquity, enabling people to send large files to each other using cheap cartridges. Broadband has stolen some of the REV's thunder, but it's still good for transporting space-hungry multimedia collections and making backups. While transfer speeds are slower than on hard drives, they're much faster than on tapes.