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What hard drive to buy at the Apple Store

19.12.2009
'Twas the week before Christmas, and you've decided to give your loved ones the gift of data security or capacity -- a hard drive for extra storage or backup. There's no time to order something online, so you're going to head down to the . But looking for storage in the Apple Store can be daunting. When you step into the store, the smiling color-coordinated Apple employees will want to answer your questions about the iPhone and new iMacs. They want to interest you in the new MacBook Pro. They don't, however, have a great deal of knowledge about storage.

When visiting the Apple Store, you'll likely be confronted with a wall of drives, and picking among the brightly colored boxes is no easy task. In , external hard drives are in a small corner of the second floor, right next to games. (It's nice to know my two areas of expertise are stashed way in the back. Sigh.) At this store, Apple stocked products from a small selection of companies, mainly the big dogs: Western Digital, LaCie, Iomega, G-Technology (now owned by Hitachi), and Verbatim.

First, you need to establish what you want to get out of the drive. A good place to look is our and .

: If you've decided on a portable drive, you have a plethora of bus-powered options. , , and , and , and were all available at my Apple Store. They vary in price, from the relatively cheap WD models to the pricey G-Drive. All of these received good to great scores in our reviews.

If you're looking for a great all-around portable drive, I'd go with the Iomega eGo line (). The eGo offers FireWire's speed (it produced some of the best read/write scores in our lab tests) with USB's versatility, ensuring virtually any machine can run the hard drive.

But if the intended recipient of the drive plans on tossing the device into a backpack or is perhaps a bit clumsy, then you'll want more durability in your portable drive. The LaCie Rugged All-Terrain hard drive () is a great option, offering more shock resistance than the Iomega eGo but sacrificing the speedier FireWire connection ports.