The market is completely saturated with SD cards, but which one will give you the best bang for the buck? We are taking a look at seven different cards ranging in different densities and speeds to find out.

In this great hardware industry, it's not uncommon to see standards upgraded time and time again. DDR1 to DDR2, ISA to PCI to AGP to PCI-E, Socket 7 to Socket 775, et cetera. This means constant upgrades to the consumer, and that sometimes leaves them in the dark when they only want a simple upgrade but find out that they need to upgrade their entire system.

Case in point: S-ATA hard drives. S-ATA wasn't commonplace until a couple years ago, so some older PC's don't have any ports but instead rely on the good 'ole IDE connections. Today, it's much easier, and sometimes even cheaper, to go with an S-ATA drive over an IDE. Both types have their benefits, but S-ATA is obviously the current and future. Tighter connections that allow better airflow, and overall better bandwidth.

Perpendicular Recording Technology is certainly the star of the show here, but Adaptive Fly Height and Clean Sweep are supporting players that simply get the job done in keeping data intact without any intervention from the user. Add NCQ, huge storage capacity, 5-year warranty, and solid performance, and you have a drive well worth picking up.

WESTERN DIGITAL'S RAPTORS have long set the performance standard for desktop Serial ATA drives. With the Raptor X, Western Digital also upped the ante on looks by offering a view of the drive's internals. Although the Raptor X's window is certainly an impressive engineering accomplishment, especially given the drive's 10,000 RPM spindle speed, the novelty wears thin pretty quickly.

For those with no desire to spend countless hours staring at the Raptor X's drive head dart back and forth across the platter, Western Digital makes the Raptor WD1500ADFD. This drive lacks a window, but otherwise, it's mechanically identical to the Raptor X–same spindle, cache, platters, and theoretically, performance. The WD1500ADFD also sells for roughly $50 less than the Raptor X, making it even more tempting for enthusiasts looking for a speedy storage upgrade.

Thanks to identical internals, we can expect the WD1500ADFD's performance to at least match that of the Raptor X. But how much faster are these Raptors than the best 7,200-RPM desktop drives on the market? Can they keep up with Seagate's latest perpendicular Barracuda 7200.10? Read on to find out.

Seagate has come to the rescue and done a fantastic job to bring the mobile hard disk towards desktop component speeds. With SATA now starting to take hold in mobile markets as the interface of choice simply because of its serial nature requiring less voltage and fewer data pins, we can expect to see 44-pin Parallel ATA drivers taking a back seat and drives such as this one going a long way to helping mobile computing performance reach the same level as desktop.

Western Digital was the bigger winner at CES, due to the announcement of their 150 GB Raptor and the windowed Raptor X, but they have been relatively quiet since then. This is not that bad of a thing though, WD has been doing very well, at least on the consumer level, and offers some of the most competitive drives currently available. One of these is the focus of this review, the Caviar SE16 WD5000KS 500 GB. Half-terabyte hard drives have been appearing in consumers' dream systems for a few months now, but their price level has put them out of reach to most people. Though they may have a big price tag, they are a great way to consolidate a lot of information onto a single drive or RAID1 array.

Although this USB 2.0 drive is not the quickest on the market, the other features sure make up for the shortfall. Once you have this drive in your hand you will soon realize what I am talking about. This drive is just ridiculously small and has all the features you would expect from a normal flash drive. Hell, I loved even showing people this drive. Even the computer enthusiasts I have as friends did do a double take when they saw me pull this small unit out of my pocket. The drive that is.....I mean......sigh.......

Seagate has introduced to us once again the largest consumer drive available, and we have it on our testbench. Surprisingly, not only does it have much more space than the previous 500GB model, it also proves to be much faster. Let's take a close look at the drive, and see just what perpendicular magnetic recording can offer us.

Today, we're going to review a drive that may play a role in in removing one of the remaining two check marks, longevity. Seagate recently introduced the new NL35™ series of SATA drives which they call 'Near Line' that takes direct aim at the workstation/entry-level server environment. A quote from Seagate states: 'The NL35™ Series drives are designed for workloads that fall between enterprise workloads and desktop computer or entry-level server workloads. NL35 Series drives are not appropriate for true high duty-cycle enterprise workloads.' Hmmm! A niche market for drives or a stepping stone to the future? Please join me for a look at the Seagate ST3500641NS, 500 GB SATA Drive to ascertain if the differences this product brings to the table truly indicate this product's future is as bright as the manufacturer's literature suggests.

There seems to be a problem that's constant with computers throughout the years. That problem is not enough storage space to feed our habits. Whether or not you actually need *this* much storage, there's no denying it's supremeness.

Today we would like to introduce to you a new member of the successful Raptor hard disk drive family from Western Digital. This new HDD with 150GB storage capacity demonstrated superior performance in a single-user environment. Besides, it features a unique design peculiarity - transparent clear case top that allows you to see what's going on inside. Read more about this extremely successful product in our detailed review!

Over the last few months, Kingwin has sent me quite a lot of products to review for them. So far to date, all of their products have lived up to expectations and performed well. The product under the scope today will be the Kingwin KF-25 Data Dock. This is a unit that fits into a standard 3.5" floppy drive bay and provides an USB port and 2.5" HDD enclosure. The kicker here is that these items are removable and can be used on other computers as an external USB hub or removable HDD.

SERIAL ATA MAY HAVE all but taken over on the desktop, but plain old ATA is still going strong in the mobile space. Only recently did Serial ATA support make its way into mobile core logic chipsets, and not all laptop manufacturers took advantage of that capability when it first became available. Many waited until second-generation Serial ATA chipsets, such as those in Intel's latest "Napa" Centrino platform, to transition laptop designs to SATA.

The slow pace of mobile SATA hard drive adoption has created a massive installed base of ATA-equipped laptops, many of which are ripe for a hard drive upgrade. Laptops generally come equipped with painfully slow drives with as little as 2 MB of cache and spindle speeds as slow as 4,200 RPM. These drives generally don't offer much in the way of capacity, either, with many topping out at only 30 or 40 GB. Fortunately, numerous alternatives exist, including drives with 8 MB of cache and spindle speeds as fast as 7,200 RPM. Greater capacities are available, as well, with most new mobile drives offering between 100 and 120 GB, and at least one leveraging perpendicular recording technology to crack the 160 GB mark.

To gain a better understanding of how the performance of today's latest and greatest 2.5" mobile ATA drives looks, we've gathered seven drives from the likes of Fujitsu, Hitachi, Seagate, and Western Digital. This mix of drives includes a little of everything, including a 160 GB perpendicular monster and a couple of 7,200-RPM speed demons. We've also thrown in a lowly 4,200 RPM drive that will serve as a handy reference point for anyone considering upgrading their laptop's hard drive. Join us as we subject this collection of drives to a punishing array of performance, noise level, and power consumption tests in search of the ultimate ATA laptop drive.

Processors are incredibly fast, RAM is rocketing its way through our games, and videocards pack more punch than ever. With all these screamingly fast system components available, often the hard drive is neglected. It's a commonly known fact that despite of several improvements in the past years, hard drives are still the biggest performance bottleneck in desktop systems today. That is why having a fast, large hard drive should be a priority for all computer users.

Today we take a look at two of the largest desktop drives on the market from two of the most popular hard drive vendors. From Western Digital, we received the Caviar SE 4000KD which is a 400GB 4-platter SATA-II behemoth, and from Seagate, the Barracuda 7200.9 500GB 4-platter SATA-II drive.

Seagate's big news today is the announcement of an update to its flagship enterprise disk, the Cheetah 15K.4. The new model, the Cheetah 15K.5 will become Seagate's top-of-the-line 15,000 RPM disk and the industry's first 3.5" disk with perpendicular recording. The new drive will feature capacity up to 300GB and will be available in SAS, Ultra320 SCSI, and fibre channel interfaces.

So you've got your camera, and your standard 64mb card supplied with it, your half way through a day and you fill your memory card up - what do you do? Simple - get yourself a monster 2gb card, you'll never run out then!

Secure Digital cards are solid-state devices designed with flash technology, a non-volatile storage solution that does not lose its information when power is removed from the card. The cards contain no moving parts and are extremely rugged, providing much greater data protection than conventional magnetic disk drives. The SD card's nimble, portable data transfer and low battery consumption makes it ideal for high-speed digital cameras, camcorders, MP3s, cell phones, PDAs, and global positioning systems. Interface options include an SD interface or a serial peripheral interface.

Today we would like to introduce to you an external storage solution from Maxtor with unprecedentedly large capacity of 1TB. It is the new member of the Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition family built with two 3.5-inch HDDs that supports three interfaces (FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0) and can come in RAID 1 or RAID 0 configuration already preset. Read more about this monster drive now!

Lite-On has provided us with the opportunity to test-drive a sample of their flagship technology, the EZ-DUB. The EZ-DUB makes big promises to simplify and streamline what has become the increasingly technical and complex task of duplicating CDs and DVDs. With this new, easy to use external drive, LITE-ON aims at users who don’t like to hassle with complicated software programs when they want to duplicate a disc or backup their files.

Flash drives have come a long way in the last four years! Today Legit Reviews takes a look at Kinston's 1GB U3 DataTraveler Flash Drive. U3 flash drives allow you to install your favorite programs to the flash drive. So, anywhere you go, you will have your programs and data on one, small flash drive! Read on to find out the full set of features and performance this device has to offer.

There are few areas that could use more attention from Gigabyte to really get this type of device a must-have item. First and foremost, the ability to support more than 4 GB of storage is a must! They could do this by increasing the individual DIMM size support to 2 GB and by doubling the number of DIMM slots on the card by adding four more on the back. That would give us up to 16 GB of storage and would open up a lot more possibilities for the iRAM in both consumer and professional applications.