On our desk this week - 8

EksitData SATA adapter

Price: €25

Data is precious, and being able to move data around is a good thing. Whether it's backing up your excising info or leeching more from a mate, hard drives are a crucial part of our media-centric lifestyle.

This little adaptor enables you to plug a SATA device into a USB port via the magic of electronics. There's a power plug that has an adaptor to go into the mains.

Whilst this provides a simple way to hook up a hard drive over USB (there are no drivers required) it's not exactly the fastest. In HDTach, our Western Digital WD2500 SATA hard drive was bursting at 79.2MB/s and the average read speed was 50.0MB/s connected via SATA directly into the motherboard. Using the adapter over USB, performance dropped to a chronic 35.1MB/s burst and a 31.6MB/s average read speed. This makes it easy to use, but slow.