Top Storage Devices in the PC World 100

We saw all kinds of roomy and speedy drives this year. Here are our top picks.

By The PC World Editorial Team

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Intel X25-M Solid State Drive 160GB

A new manufacturing process and a significantly lower price combine with great performance in this top-notch SSD. This model's speedy test results put it at the top of our chart; its price and performance make it a compelling flash upgrade for notebook or desktop users. ($500)

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SanDisk Extreme Pro CompactFlash Card

With read/write speeds of up to 90 megabytes per second, the Extreme Pro CompactFlash card is wicked fast. It's a bit pricey, but worth it for photographers who want to capture every a shot. We especially loved how we could easily shoot .jpg and .raw files without missing critical moments that we wanted to capture for posterity. For taking full advantage of your digital SLR's UDMA (mode 6) interface, this Flash card is worth its premium. ($896 for 64GB, $560 for 32GB, $336 for 16GB)

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Clickfree Traveler

This lightweight, credit-card-size device combines a generous amount of storage with easy-to-use backup software, making it perfect for people who need extra storage on the go. The Traveler's body cleverly conceals a full USB 2.0 interface, connected by a ribbon cable. Its built-in software performs full backups automatically, and can track and back up data from multiple computers. ($70 for 16GB, $130 for 32GB, $220 for 64GB)

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Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1TB

A terabyte for your pocket, anyone? Western Digital is first out of the gate with its stylish, compact portable hard drive, which packs 1TB of storage on a 2.5-inch drive inside its chassis. Western Digital is first among the hard-drive makers to migrate to micro-USB for connections, too--making more-streamlined designs possible. ($199)

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Seagate Replica

The unobtrusive Replica backs up your entire computer, including system drives, and continues to protect your data in real time for as long as it's connected. It operates in the background and uses a subtle interface within Windows Explorer. The Replica's software provides password protection, which can be used on multiple computers. (Prices start at $130)

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Synology DS209+ II

With a stable, reliable, attractive OS and more features than you can shake a stick at--RAID striping and mirroring, DLNA media serving, video surveillance, and integrated backup, to name a few--Synology's handsome DS209+ II is network-attached storage in a class of its own. Its predecessor was the fastest NAS box we had ever tested. The DS209+ II is a bit slower with groups of files, but slightly faster with large files; more important, it's twice as fast at finding files. Synology continues to add features via free OS upgrades, which makes the DS209+ II's stratospheric price easier to tolerate. ($440)

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Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EADS

How about 2TB of space on a single drive? The WD20EADS is a boon to anyone with a large data archive, multimedia library, or space-hogging video collection. It's also part of WD's Green Power line of hard-disk drives, billed as environmentally friendly drives due to their lower power consumption.

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