Group test: what's the best storage device?

5. Western Digital My Passport Studio 1TB

• Reviewed on: 13 October 11
• RRP: £110 inc VAT
• Rating:

We’re almost inclined to excuse the 2011 WD My Passport Studio’s continuing omission of Thunderbolt. This sturdy example of high-tech engineering may stretch the pocket in more way than one, but it’s worth every pound and gramme of it. Formidable FireWire performance and finally some worthy software all underline the whole tidy package. The WD My Passport Studio sets a new high benchmark for such pocket drives.

4. WD Red 3TB

• Reviewed on: 10 September 12
• RRP: £140 inc VAT
• Rating:

In the WD Red, Western Digital has pulled off a great balance of features for this specialist network-storage hard disk. It runs as quietly as the low-power Caviar Green yet with performance more like a fast 7200rpm desktop PC hard drive. Currently selling for around £100 for the 2TB version and £140 for 3TB, it’s also accessibly priced.

3. iStorage diskAshur 500GB

• Reviewed on: 8 August 12
• RRP: £159 inc VAT
• Rating:

The iStorage benefits from a USB 3.0 interface to give transfer speeds around twice that of its USB 2.0 predecessor. The bottleneck to moving data in and out is only the internal disk itself.

2. G-Technology G-RAID with Thunderbolt 8TB

• Reviewed on: 27 April 12
• RRP: £720 inc VAT
• Rating:

The more time we spent testing this unit, the more respect we had for its incredible performance. Relatively quiet in use, the G-Technology G-RAID with Thunderbolt nevertheless proved to be a powerhouse in both capacity and performance. With that huge 8TB of storage on offer, accessible at real-world speeds consistently exceeding 300 MBps, the G-RAID offers size and speed that should satisfy any media professional or Mac power user.

1. Crucial M4

• Reviewed on: 27 July 11
• RRP: £338.27 inc VAT
• Rating:

From the lab tests, the Crucial M4 displays clear improvements over the Crucial C300 – in most key respects. The headline-grabbing speeds are indisputably superior, up to 438MB/s read speeds in our tests and 281MB/s when writing. Small file transfer characteristics are less eye-catching but absolutely key to smooth PC operation. And here we saw improved write speeds, but slightly reduced reads. In the context of either of the Crucials’ great small file performance though, we haven’t seen any SSD with the Crucial M4’s terrific sequential speeds, tempered with such consummate small-file transfer juggling and high IOPS. This Crucial M4 SSD easily takes the crown as best SSD we’ve seen and comes highly recommended – especially given its price drop from the C300 of last year.