Almost a year ago, we received storage-related hardware that vendors sent to our lab without our staff asking for it. Most of the products weren't exciting like a new GeForce or Radeon card to justify stand-alone reviews. Instead, we decided to publish loose roundups, where all of these products would find their place. After publishing reviews of solutions that organize hard drive handling and or storage accessories for geeks and administrators, we will now discuss four new products that are intended to offer interface and handling flexibility. (Compare Prices on 1 TB Hard Drives)

The storage industry is not quite as well positioned in the mainstream and low-end market as it is in the SMB and enterprise space. Solutions exist that cater to almost all the requirements of large enterprises and there is an increasing selection of flexible storage and backup solutions and related appliances for small- and medium-sized businesses. The reasons for this development are simple: The amount of data businesses have to handle keeps increasing at an incredible rate. And while storage device vendors try to keep up by increasing the capacity of the media they offer (take 1 TB hard drives as a good example), it is equally important to store data redundantly and to create backups that are reliable to protect data when worst-case scenarios become a reality.

As I said, there are sufficient options for large-scale scenarios, but the end user often fails or at least gets frustrated trying to solve rather simple issues: Isn't there a truly simple way of attaching several eSATA drives to a host PC? What if the favorite external storage device doesn't spot the favorite interface? How should you handle data synchronization between your desktop PC and your mobile hard drive? And could anyone please stop the annoying noise coming from the high-performance hard drive? Addonics, Silverstone, Sunplus and Titan have attempted to offer remedies for these end-user challenges.

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