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If your PC's hard drive is approaching its limit and a CD-RW drive doesn't meet all your storage needs, you are not alone. Nowadays, Windows XP eats up 1.5GB all by itself, and many garden-variety applications hog even more space. Add to that users' growing interest in creating, saving, and sharing lots of space-hogging digital files (photos, songs, presentations), and it's no wonder a crowd of storage products has arrived to meet demand.

Familiar standbys such as internal hard drives, CD-RW drives, and Iomega Zip drives have been joined by a range of surprisingly versatile lesser-known products that could help with your disk-space crunch, whether you need a format that's affordable, fast, vast, portable, or flexible.

Though sorting through the disparate options can seem daunting, it really boils down to three main categories: magnetic hard drives, optical drives, and miniature storage. Each type has its drawbacks as well as its advantages.

To help you weigh the trade-offs, we examined nine alternative storage products (in comparison with three conventional products). We looked at several external hard drives and a typical internal drive; we evaluated a number of optical drives (three that represent recordable DVD standards and one traditional CD-RW drive); and we surveyed a smattering of miniature products, throwing in an external Iomega Zip Drive for comparison.

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