It’s been less than a year since I acquired my trusty MacBook Pro, but it’s already filled to capacity with important documents and precious photos. Since I can’t physically expand the disk space within the computer, the search was on for a Mac-friendly hard drive that offers the holy trisect of features: speed, capacity, and reliability. I put three of the most promising new external drives to the test to see which one could live up to my demanding storage requirements.

Recently, Sony announced that they were killing the 3.5-inch floppy disk. Which is fine, as far as we’re concerned. Macs haven’t used floppy disks in well over a decade, and with the internet, who needs ’em? But sometimes you just need to move files from point A to point B with a minimum of fuss, which is where the USB flash drive comes in. Plug it into your Mac, copy some files, plug it into another Mac--boom! File transfer done. While we usually use flash drives to move images, Word docs, and maybe a few ripped MP3s between machines, Kingston’s new Data Traveler 310 is made to carry a lot more--256 gigabytes, to be exact.

Backing up your hard drive is important. But even the most rigorous backup plan isn’t going to help if your house floods--or worse, catches on fire. In a true disaster, even your triple-redundant RAID backup system isn’t likely to be much help. With dark days like that in mind, ioSafe’s line of fireproof, waterproof externals might be big and bulky, but they promise to withstand even the toughest data disasters.