Tom’s Hardware recently put a bunch of “hand-held drives with up to 500GB” through their respective paces. All drives connect to PCs via USB 2.0. Despite the curious choice of including a 320GB and (a 1.8″) 120GB drive in that round-up, the conclusion is clear:

Consumers: Go Samsung
That leaves Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital. Performance differences clearly shouldn’t dictate your purchasing decision here. All three offer backup and encryption paired with great style. Samsung clearly focuses on consumers, while Seagate and WD also support synchronization and go after real enthusiasts.
Enthusiasts: Pick Seagate or Western Digital
Seagate has the optional drive dock that …read more

To be clear, Western Digital actually released the RE4-GP series of enterprise-class hard drives, with a max capacity of 2 terabytes. That’s two-thousand gigabytes by the way, in case you were wondering.
Aside from such roomy capacity, the RE4-GP series promises a 64MB cache (your high-end consumer-level hard drives usually features 32MB only), and a sustained transfer rate of up to 110 megabytes per second. There are four platters within the unit, each capable of storing 500GB each.
Only about 7 to 8 watts are needed to run the hard disk, highlighted as part of Western Digital’s marketing strategy to show how …read more

My 250GB Western Digital My Passport Essential external hard drive is a personal favorite. Through months of heavy use, I’ve never experienced any issues or troubles with the unit, and the transfer speeds on this thing through USB 2.0 are fast. And as a satisfied reviewer on NewEgg writes: “It produces almost no heat”. Most importantly, the drive itself is very compact and portable.