Of course internal storage, be it through IDE or Serial ATA, is all well and good, but it does have a few limitations. Firstly, for the novice user, installing a new hard drive is a terrifying process, involving messing with cables and jumpers (in the case of IDE) and even worse, actually opening your PC! Secondly, you are quite tightly limited with the number of devices you can fit inside your shiny machine - Even if you're lucky enough to have an nForce 4 motherboard or the like capable of accepting ten Serial ATA devices, how many users realistically have a case big enough to take that much storage?! Finally, internal drives means next to zero portability - If you have a lot of data you want to make available on another machine, you'll either have to burn it off to CD or DVD, or network the machines together in some way. Again, back to my own home setup, that means transferring files across my all-wireless network, which means a time-consuming task even at 802.11g speeds.

The solution to these woes is an obvious one - External storage. We are now in an era where all modern PCs have at least USB 2.0 connectivity, and quite probably FireWire too, opening up a whole new world of high-speed data transfer and easy to install devices. This brings us neatly to the product we'll be taking a brief look at today - Western Digital's 120GB USB 2.0 external hard disk.