PC World's Top 100
If you need more storage and a safe place to put your backups, consider an external hard drive.Freelance writers Richard Jantz, Mick Lockey, and Carla Thornton and PC World editors Richard Baguley, Laura Blackwell, Tracey Capen, Seán Captain, Rebecca Freed, Kalpana Ettenson, Alexandra Krasne, Melissa J. Perenson, and Alan Stafford contributed to the Top 100 section. Ulrike Diehlmann, Julio Giannobile, Elliott Kirschling, Jeff Kuta, Tony K. Leung, and Thomas Luong of the PC World Test Center performed testing on the products reviewed in this section, with logistical support from Julian Weatherby.
Are you a data pack rat--obsessively archiving your e-mail or incessantly collecting digital photos and new songs? If so, your PC's internal hard drive may be getting cramped. And what about backing it all up? Whether your drive holds the hottest tunes or the dullest financial records, losing your data is a disaster. An external hard drive adds storage space and provides a safe place for your backups. We evaluated and lab-tested nine external drives: six semiportable desktop units based on 3.5-inch hard drives and three ultraportables based on 2.5-inch or smaller drives. Maxtor's OneTouch desktop drive won our Best Buy designation thanks to good performance and smooth operation (made easier by a detailed manual). The 250GB model is pricey at $350, but Maxtor sells other sizes, such as a 120GB (USB-only) unit for $200. Among ultraportables, we picked the $220, 40GB IOGear Combo 2.5-Inch Ion Drive for its compact design and relatively low price. (Read "The Outsiders: Disks That Do More.")
Your Guide to the Top 100
Each month, we test a large number of PCs, printers, monitors, and other products. Only the best products land on the charts, which are refreshed monthly.
Configurations are shown as tested. The overall rating for each product is calculated on a 100-point scale and reflects results from our hands-on evaluations and performance tests. A 90-point score is exceptional, while one in the 70s is above average.
For desktops and notebooks, the PC WorldBench 4 score is a measure of how fast a PC can run a mix of common business applications as compared with our baseline machine, a Gateway Select 1200 with a 1.2-GHz Athlon processor, 128MB of PC133 SDRAM, and a 20GB hard drive. For example, a PC that scores 120 is 20 percent faster than the baseline system. The support policies score is based on vendor support policies (not shown on charts). Click here for additional details on how we compile charts for the Top 100.