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Outside the Box

Flash memory is indispensable for shuttling files between your PC and your camera, audio player, or PDA. But even if you eschew gadgets, you may still find a use for an external storage device--especially if you need to work on the same data in multiple locations or need to keep it under lock and key when you're finished.

Overshadowing removable devices are the unprecedented price and performance of rewritable CD drives. For pennies per megabyte, CD-RW gives you virtually unlimited file storage suitable for many kinds of data, including photographs and music. But CD-RW is too slow and too small (at a maximum of 700MB) for other tasks, such as digital video editing.

A portable hard drive offers the highest performance and capacity, because it's built around a standard desktop or laptop drive. The fastest portable hard drives attach to your computer using IEEE 1394 (FireWire) or USB 2.0 connections. SmartDisk's new 40GB FireLite FireWire drive sold for $352 (according to PriceGrabber.com) as we went to press, while Maxtor's 120GB Personal Storage 3000LE USB 2.0 drive went for just $277, about 0.2 cents per megabyte. Now that's cheap removable storage.

If you use a laptop and need a removable drive--but don't need the speed, capacity, and bulk of a USB 2.0 or FireWire model--PC Card drives may be your best bet. Kingston and Toshiba make hard drives that fit into a standard Type II PC Card slot. We found Toshiba's 5GB PC Card drive selling for as little as $353 as we went to press. At 7 cents per megabyte, the price per megabyte is higher than that of external drives, but it beats flash memory devices hands down. Toshiba is working on higher-density 1.8-inch drives that could one day possibly boost its PC Card drives' capacity to 20GB.

For even more portable storage, there's always Trekstor's Thumbdrive, which is already available in sizes up to 512MB. At press time the Thumbdrive sold for well over a dollar per megabyte, as did M-Systems' similar DiskOnKey and Sony's stylish Micro Vault.

--S.S.

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