External Drives for the Office and the Road
Maxtor's OneTouch is fast and easy to use. Among ultraportables, IOGear's 2.5-Inch Ion Drive offers the most for the money.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.")