UPDATE: This review was updated in October, 2012 to reflect changes in pricing and availability.

If low cost is your primary concern, you'd be hard pressed to find a better drive for the money than Hitachi's Touro Desk Pro. The sleek, all-black enclosure looks great on your desktop, but that's where it will most likely stay since you'll need to keep it plugged into the DC power supply.

It's fast – read and write to the 7,200-rpm drive using USB 3.0 if you have it, or USB 2.0 if you don't. Capacity and price breakdown is simple: 1TB for $90, 2TB for $130 and 4TB for $240. There are 3TB versions on shelves, but they are rare and more difficult to find.

And $130 for a 2TB drive is a good deal – that's in the same neighborhood as what you'd lay out for a more portable drive with half the capacity.

Each drive comes with a 2-year warranty and some freemium cloud backup software. Also, the design is stackable, so if you double up, two drives will nestle together nicely.

WIRED Affordable. Inexpensive compared to more portable models. Stackable design, which eases expansion.

TIRED Needs to stay connected to the power supply, so it's not portable. Hitachi's cloud-based backup software isn't nearly as simple as setting up a Dropbox account, or a cloud storage account from some other provider.