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Storage is like money: You can never have too much. And you need different denominations for different situations.

When picking a storage device, you'll want to balance several factors, including capacity, portability, and cost. Which one you choose will depend on how you intend to use your storage. For example, you may want to transport files on a flash memory drive that you can put in your pocket and attach to any computer that has a USB port. Perhaps you want to burn data to cheap discs that most CD or DVD drives can read. Or maybe you want to transfer gigabytes of files to a hard drive.

To address these different storage situations, we separated the products in this review into three categories: "Put It in Your Pocket," "Make Multiple Copies," and "Really Pack It Away." After all, you wouldn't rely on a comparatively slow optical or cartridge drive with removable media to back up your entire hard disk-- not when the external hard drives we tested were far faster and could complete the task in one step. And you wouldn't reach for a hard drive if you had a pocket-size flash memory drive to tote your presentation from desktop to laptop.

We tested 15 products in the PC World Test Center; our Best Buy picks in each category--SanDisk's pocket-size Cruzer, Sony's DRU-510A DVD burner, and Maxtor's Personal Storage 5000DV external hard drive--offered the best mix we could find of capacity, portability, and price.

One factor behind the recent expansion in storage options is widespread support for USB 2.0 on new desktop and notebook PCs. At 480 megabits (60 megabytes) per second, USB 2.0 is fast enough that it doesn't slow down external drive performance, as USB 1.1 does. And since neither USB 2.0 nor the less common FireWire 400 requires you to install drivers or special software, connecting drives using these interfaces is painless, and the drives will work almost instantly under Windows Millennium Edition, 2000, or XP. The same is true of the new FireWire 800 interface, also known as IEEE 1394b, which doubles the maximum speed to 800 mbps (100 MBps). In light of the convenience of these fast interfaces, it's no wonder that external drives are becoming so popular.