Storage

The My Passport is Western Digital's mainstream line of portable hard drives. The best performer in the roundup, it's available in 500GB to 2TB flavors for twice the available capacity of any of the other drives we tested.

Intel has revved up its mainstream SSD line from the Series 330 to the Series 335, and the company sent over a 240GB model for evaluation (and 240GB is apparently the only capacity it is launching this series with). The new drives feature 20nm NAND flash memory, compared with the 25nm chips in the older series, but Intel continues to use an LSI/SandForce SF-2281 controller with custom Intel firmware. The company uses the same controller in its Series 330 and Series 520 drives.

The recent Dropbox data breach has many IT executives telling employees not to use it. These five products offer the administrative and security features that may restore their faith in cloud data storage.

With the release of the Backup Plus Portable Drive for Mac, Seagate has reinvented its line of portable hard drives, incorporating a number of desirable features into its new design.

If having to pay $7+ per gigabyte for secure flash drives makes you blanch, take a look at the Lenovo ThinkPad USB 3.0 Secure Hard Drive. At only $200 for 750GB—which translates to about 4GB per $1—and PIN-pad security, it's a lot more affordable than secure flash drives. Plus, the ThinkPad USB 3.0 Secure Hard Drive is faster than the USB flash drives, most of which are USB 2.0. As a 2.5-inch hard drive it's not as portable or rugged as the flash drives , but it's where you go if you need the capacity.

RecImg Manager is a Metro interface and manager for the new Windows 8 recimg.exe command line utility and the recovery images it creates. Unlike full images, recovery images don't contain or documents, user settings, etc.; these are left alone when a recovery image is created or restore. However, they do contain everything else, and with no differential or incremental options, they are generally quite large.

Digital photography has made it possible to document nearly every event without spending a fortune on film. But this surfeit of photos presents a challenge, too: What’s the best way to share them all?

SkyDrive seemed destined to be another Microsoft also-ran product. Although introduced long before the current wave of cloud-based synchronization and storage services, SkyDrive had a number of frustrating limits, and comprised two separately named services (central and peer-to-peer file transfer) under one hood. Then Microsoft did something marvelous. The same week that Google released its long-expected Google Drive, Microsoft unveiled a thorough revamping of SkyDrive into an explicable and competitive service. (Microsoft lists the version that I reviewed as version 16.4.)

If you think that LaCie’s latest network attached storage product, the 2Big NAS, looks like something you’ve seen before, you’re right. But beneath the familiar appearance (the basic design of the 2Big has been around since 2007), there are a number of differences under the hood.

Even with all the online storage now available, sharing files -- especially large ones -- can still be a problem. We look at 10 online services that aim to make it simpler.

Seagate's new line of Backup Plus drives is a convenient way to ensure data from your computer and from social networking sites is backed up.

From network services and storage to virtualization and private cloud, the beefy new Windows Server leaves no server role unturned