Toshiba has announced new ranges of hard drives at IFA that it believes are larger or cleverer than anything that came before them.

First up is EasyGuard, which is all about hoarding and protecting your data. The first product in the range is an external 2.5-inch laptop hard drive with a massive 320GB capacity and a 'freefall' sensor that protects the read/write heads in the event of shocks or drops.

The second EasyGuard product is a "ruggedised" (but not freefall-enabled) external hard drive with a fingerprint reader (pictured). The idea is that this'll keep your data secure, so long as you don't accidentally leave your fingers at home. Prices are unconfirmed, but you should be able to buy them any day now. Click here for more

Floppy disks were pocket-sized time-bombs in the 80s and 90s. We carried our data in their precarious bellies, dragging them like leaky buckets from one computer to another -- certain that every journey might be their last. It was a hopeless task. Why did we bother? We'd witness funeral after funeral, and the epitaphs were always the same: "bad sector", "failed to write to disk", or "unable to read from Drive A:".

It's the end of the magnetic track for the 3.5-inch floppy disk -- or so says electronics superstore PC World. But, cynics will have noticed that the Dixons group (which owns PC World) has a nasty habit of claiming that an old technology has 'passed away' and then continuing to sell it. Is this harmless self-promotion, or headline-grabbing nonsense? Click here for more

Want to get your files organised? Want to get on top of those gigabytes of MP3 and movie files? We checked out the latest Ethernet Disk mini from LaCie to see if it offered an easy route to storage heaven.

Crave was very impressed with the Buffalo LinkStation Pro we looked at a while back. When LaCie sent us its 500GB NAS (network attached storage) hard drive, we were keen to see how it fared -- it offers a little extra in the area of media serving.

The beauty of a NAS is that you can store all your files on an external hard drive that's independent from any computer. We connected this one to an Ethernet switch and, after running a configuration file on the PC, we had access to the massive 500GB of storage from our desktop PCs and wirelessly from our laptops. Performance was pretty good too -- we threw large files across our network to the drive and it handled everything in its stride. Click here for more

Now that high-definition video is de rigueur for any filmmaker worth his fashionably distressed Diesels, we all need something to cart captured footage around in. While old-school DV ate up a polite 13GB per hour, HDV (the consumer HD format used by Sony) binge-eats an outrageous 38GB to 50GB per hour. If you want to move projects around, you're going to need something like this pocket-sized Formac Disk Mini 120GB.

We're hardened cynics in this arena -- victims of multiple hard disk failures, not to mention the flashbacks that still visit us after the 1GB Iomega Jaz drive fiasco of 1999 -- but in our preliminary tests the Formac Disk Mini performed well. Last night we loaded it with a 50GB HDV video project we're working on and took it across London. The project survived two Tube zones in a rucksack and delivered its payload gracefully onto another machine. Click here for more

Multimedia file hoarders rejoice: Western Digital has just announced a new terabyte storage device for under £400. The gorgeous Western Digital My Book Professional Edition II not only makes most of its rivals look like the brittle shavings of a tramp's verruca-encrusted feet, it also offers a shed-load more storage.

The device, which consists of two separate 500GB hard drives, provides enough space to store 125 hours of high-definition movie footage, nearly 1,500 DivX movies or 256,000 MP3 files -- enough continuous music to ensure you never hear the same song twice in nearly two years. That's a helluva lot. Click here for more

With more and more devices going digital, the need for digital storage has never been greater. If you own an MP3 player, digital camera, mobile phone or laptop, then you should think about backing up your data before it's too late. As Confucius said, the stultifying dullness of backing up is infinitely preferable to the nightmare of losing all your tracks.

iomega thinks it has the solution with its one terabyte StorCenter Wireless Network Storage device. That's 1,024GB of storage space, enough for a few hundred thousand MP3s or over a thousand movies. It offers a zippy transfer rate of up to 1Gbps. Once transferred, you can access your data wirelessly with your laptop or PDA. Click here for more

Pens couldn't hold much before. Ink mostly, and even that regularly leaked out. Then came along the pen drive -- smaller than the normal ballpoint, it didn't hold ink but stored a variety of information instead. But even then there were limits.

Fortunately for us, PNY doesn't care about such barriers and has brought us a pen drive with a hefty 4GB capacity -- the Attaché Pro.This amount of space will let you carry hundreds of low-res photos, music tracks or documents. Click here for more

Nothing beats blank CDs and DVDs for casual file-sharing. They hold a decent amount of data and can be discarded without the sickening feeling of financial loss you'd get from throwing a costly 4GB memory card out the window. Our only gripe with optical media is that labelling is a nightmare.

Until now, that is. Jaded by the tediousness of deciphering our own illegible scrawls from a thousand rewritables, we've resorted to using the NEC ND-4551A drive with Labelflash technology.

It's the world's first DVD burner with Labelflash, a system that lets you burn custom motifs, text or images to the top side of blank DVD media. The idea is that it does away with cumbersome paper labelling systems, which could affect the reliability and accessibility of your data. Click here for more

Staring at an external hard disk may be enough to drive you to politics, but hold off on sociocultural suicide for just one moment -- this is one mass storage device that might float your coat. It's a 400GB USB drive with independent power supply and fanless operation.

The Buffalo DriveStation uses a 7200rpm SATA drive mechanism. This theoretically makes it fast enough for HD editing, but we suspect there may be a bottleneck because of the maximum practical transfer rates of USB. Further tests will confirm or disprove this wild assumption.

We're impressed that the DriveStation arrived pre-formatted -- it worked straight away on our ludicrously powerful desktop Mac. Multiple DriveStations can be stacked to save space on the desk, but a single unit prefers to stand vertically on four little rubber feet.

Disappointingly, our review unit wouldn't lie flat on its side without some discernible wobble. You could fold a bit of paper and stick it under one corner for stabilisation, but this is the 21st century Buffalo! Get with the era. Aside from this small niggle, the DriveStation's cathedral-like interior should keep us in BitTorrented movies for months (all legal of course; movies we shot and edited ourselves and hold full copyright to. Ahem). -CS

Hard drives just got a lot bigger and smarter thanks to the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 range. We've just taken receipt of the absolutely ginormous 750GB version and it's a BitTorrent file hoarder's fantasy.

A cool 750GB. That's enough capacity to let you watch movies back to back for three months without seeing the same film twice; to listen to 1.6 years of continuous music without ever hearing the same track; or to store a Word document so long that even if you started reading it at birth, you'd die before you got half way through it.

The secret to the Barracuda 7200.10's size is its perpendicular recording technology. Today's drives store data lengthways across the hard disk platter, but the laws of physics (curse you, Newton!) mean you can't store bits of data any closer together using this technique. Click here for more