Buffalo DriveStation DDR 3TB £160, $200

www.buffalotech.com

Like the Solo G3, there’s more to this drive than meets the eye. Inside, a conventional threeterabyte hard drive has been boosted by the addition of one gigabyte of fast RAM, just as you’d find in a computer. This combination gives you the value and capacity you’d expect in a regular hard drive, along with performance to rival expensive solid state storage.

Transfer speeds can reach an amazing 408 megabytes per second, though copying a large number of images or sizeable videos that exceed the one-gigabyte RAM buffer will slow things down considerably. Even so, in our tests the Buffalo was always at least 25 per cent quicker than the competition. When you also factor in the reasonable price, it’s a clear winner.

With lots of space and plenty of speed, this is a brilliant drive