Our favorite storage devices

Storage devices might not be the sexiest gift out there, but for avid photographers and music collectors, having extra storage space and an easy backup option are a must. Check out CNET's picks of top home storage devices this holiday season.

The Rugged Thunderbolt is the first bus-powered portable Thunderbolt drive from LaCie. It comes in SSD-based or hard drive-based options and offers very good performance as well as ruggedness. A Thunderbolt cable and a USB 3.0 cable come included. For a Thunderbolt-based drive, it's very affordable.

The Samsung 840 Pro is the latest solid-state drive (SSD) from Samsung, designed to replace the already excellent Samsung 830. The drive is for professionals and gives very fast performance with extremely low power usage. It's also very pretty and would make a great gift for any hard-core user.

The My Passport Edge is the latest in WD's My Passport family of portable hard drives. It's very compact and light and comes with useful software for both Windows and Mac mobile users.

The WD My Book VelociRaptor Duo isn't the most affordable drive, but among the Thunderbolt drives on the market, it's the best deal for the kind of performance it has to offer. You won't find a better hard-drive-based dual-bay storage device. It would be excellent for professionals who do lots of movie-editing work.

Synology offers, by far, the best network-attached storage (NAS) on the market, and the DS412+ is one of its best. Compared with other four-bay NAS servers on the market, it is the best. The server is not just fast but offers an amazingly vast amount of features that can be managed via a stellar Web-based interface called DiskStation Manager. If you want to get the most out of your home or small-office network at a reasonable cost, this server is for you.

The Seagate Backup Plus is another great portable drive that offers excellent flexibility, inherited from Seagate's GoFlex family, with lots of functionality. The drive is also very fast, it's colorful, and it comes with excellent backup software.

The IoSafe Solo G3 is not for everybody due to its huge physical size. To make up for that it can withstand disaster, be it extreme heat or water submersion, to keep your data safe. Those with really important data should consider it as a backup drive. Being so heavy, it can also be used as a workout device.