Storage devices that make great holiday gifts

The Black 2 Dual Drive is WD's answer to hybrid drives on the market. This standard laptop internal drive actually has two separate drives inside: a 120GB solid-state drive and a 1TB hard drive. It offers great performance and large storage space, without you having to spend too much money. The drive makes an excellent gift for anybody who wants to quickly boost the speed of an aging laptop or desktop computer.

With the My Cloud, WD combines fast performance, ease of use, and a powerful and well-implemented personal cloud feature into an affordable, compact device. This is an easy gift for anyone with lots of information to share among friends and family.

The WD My Cloud EX4 is the upgraded version of the My Cloud, coming with four internal hard drives instead of one. You now can set up data protection against the case one or even two hard drives fails at the same time. The sever inherits all the goodies from its older brother and also offers several business features, making it a great gift for those who have a small business or a home office, or just want to get an advanced storage system for their connected home.

The Seagate Slim is one of many slim portable drives that came out on the market this year. However, the Seagate is a truly thin drive with great performance, making it a great gift for those needing a compact drive to carry extra data or perform backups while on the go.

The My Passport Slim isn't exactly thin, but it's very compact. Most importantly it offers great performance and up to 2TB of storage space. The WD SmartWare is also a great bonus for home users. This is an easy gift pick for anyone.

This is the third Slim drive on this list. The Toshiba Canvio Slim II is very nice-looking with a shiny finish on its aluminum casing. Bundled with easy-to-use backup software, it makes a great companion for your Windows laptop, but the design might make it better suited for a MacBook Air owner.

The Samsung 840 Evo is great for a few reasons: it's the first that offers up to 1TB of storage space, it's very fast, and, most importantly, it's also one of the most affordable drives on the market. This SSD will add top performance to any computer that currently runs a regular hard drive.

The Synology DS1513+ is not for everything, but that's not because it's hard to use or too expensive. It's very fast and has a lot to offer. This is a NAS server that will work as an excellent storage server, a powerful media server, a versatile application server, and a comprehensive Dropbox-like personal cloud server, all at the same time. For advanced or business users, this is truly a gift that will keep on giving.

The SanDisk Connect Wireless Media Drive is by far the smallest battery-operated media-streaming, data-sharing server to date. It also has one thing that no other has: a built-in SD card slot. This means, among other things, it's a perfect fit for those who take a lot of photos and want to quickly share their them with multiple devices at a time.

Thanks to its design ingenuity, the Buffalo DriveStation DDR is by far the fastest USB 3.0 external hard drive. It's even faster than a Thunderbolt drive of a similar configuration. Best of all, it's very affordable. If you have friend who's looking for a faster drive for professional work, such as movie editing or backing up a large a mount of data, this will make an awesome gift.

Similar to the Wireless Plus from Seagate, the Voyager Air is a battery-operated Wi-Fi portable media server/storage expansion for mobile devices. It can also work as a home NAS server thanks to the built-in Gigabit network port and also as a fast USB 3.0 portable drive when plugged in to a computer. This is nice gift for people who travel frequently and have a few iPads or Android mobile devices.

If you're looking to give your aging laptop (or even a desktop computer) a performance boost without spending too much on a solid-state drive (SSD), the Seagate Laptop Thin SSHD (solid-state hybrid drive) is the second best option. With 8GB of onboard flash memory, this hard drive offers an SSD-like experience in terms of boot time as well application performance.

Similar to the Corsair Voyager Air, the Wireless Plus is basically a portable drive with a built-in Wi-Fi network and a battery that offers about 10 hours of usage per charge. It's an excellent companion for your iPad or other mobile devices, and would make a great gift for almost anybody.

The Asustor AS-604T NAS server is an excellent four-bay NAS server that offers great performance, ease of use, and up to 16TB of storage space. The server will make a great gift for those looking for a centralized storage device for their advanced home network or a small office.