Buying Guide: Portable Hard Drives

LaCie

A French brand known for its styling. These drives are slightly expensive.

There are also finished products from Seagate, Transcend, Iomega, and Buffalo as well, though we didn’t have the pricing on them. You can look for them on their respective websites.

Our Ultimate Suggestion
The thing with finished products is that these only come with one year warranty which includes the hard drive as well. In comparison, the 'hard drive–enclosure' set up will have a separate 5 year warranty for the hard drive and one year for the enclosure. Besides, you can also upgrade the hard drive to a larger size whenever you want, without causing the warranty to go void.

We chose the Hitachi 80GB for its wide availability, good support and excellent value for money. And coupled it with the Vantec's NexStar enclosure, its a killer deal. The NexStar was chosen mostly for its neat looks (mirror metallic finish), good transfer speeds, reliability of operation and an excellent carry case which also accommodates the USB cable.