Plextor PX-PH04U

Coming in slightly smaller than most portable hard disks, Plextor's PX-PH04U offers 40Gb of storage for your photos, music and other files.

This is enough for around 10,000 songs, or perhaps 50 compressed feature-length movie files.

It is reasonably fast, transferring 1Gb of data in around a minute, but is no faster than would be expected for such a USB 2 drive (it will also work with the slower USB). It has a power socket, should your USB hub not be able to power the drive, but no mains adapter in the box.

The display lights on the front look quite good in use and change colour depending on whether the drive is plugged in to a USB or USB 2 port.

It features a write-protect switch to stop you from changing what's on the disk, but there seems to be little in the way of physical protection, should the disk be dropped or otherwise manhandled.

There isn't much to distinguish the Plextor drive from the many others on the shelves, but it gets the job done perfectly well, and it's reliable and inexpensive. There's also an 80Gb version available.