Western Digital My Book Elite

The Mybook Elite is a standard external hard disk that connects to the computer using a USB connection.

There's one clever feature which is that it has an e-ink screen on the front, which shows both how much space is left on the disk, as well as a label.

To set the label you'll need to install the software, which is included on the disk, and also includes tools for backing up your documents and data, as well as setting a password to access the disk. Changing the name was a painless process once we had installed the software.

In use the disk was quick and quiet, with transfer speeds as we would expect from a disk such as this – approximately 1GB per minute over the USB2 connection. It takes power from an external power supply, and there's no way to run it otherwise.

Several capacities are available, from 640GB to 2TB (2,000GB). The 640GB and 1TB disk prices are not much higher than those of an equivalent internal hard disk, but there is a considerable premium on the 2TB model, which has a £200 recommended price.

That's par for the course for such a big external disk, however, and internet discounting makes it available for a good-value £150 at the time of writing.