Hard Drives

Choices, Choices, Choices...
No matter what your storage requirements might be you can choose from a wide range of manufacturers of hard drives that offer a choice of USB, Firewire, NAS or iSCSI transfer speeds in a variety of flavors, shapes and sizes.

Brand Consideration
While most consumers know that they can pick up a Maxtor, Western Digital or Seagate hard drive at any box store, there are several other brands to choose from that offer great storage capacity and backup features.

Want to get elegant about your storage? If you answered yes then you should take a look at the Lacie custom made artist / designer hard drives. These award winning products will look great sitting in that new home entertainment center.

Fujitsu recently announced their partnership with ioSafe for the manufacturing of fireproof backup - an internal hard drive that is waterproof and can withstand damage during a disaster such as fire, flood or sprinklers systems.

Connectivity - USB? FireWire? NAS?
Which hard drive is best for you? Well this can depend on the type of digital media that you are storing (photos, images, video, etc) as well as how fast you need to access this data. NAS or network attached storage can offer data transfer speeds of up to 1 GB per minute - perfect for showing off family photo slideshow at blazing speeds this holiday season :) This doesn't mean you can't do the same with USB 2.0 or FireWire 400 or 800, but you'll get that data faster on a network!

If you are sharing the backup drive at the office or at home, you'll appreciate the NAS version even more! But please don't loose any doubt about direct attached storage USB devices!

So what can you learn here? Looks at your options, make a comparison of the pros and cons of each brand and read a lot of reviews before making your purchase!