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Samsung SyncMaster XL2370

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

Each holiday season, millions of computers celebrate the holidays isolated and unappreciated for all the hard work they do throughout the year. Whether you just unwrapped a new PC or you're just looking to upgrade your old standby Windows XP or Mac G5 computer, we have the perfect accessories to complement your system.

From replacement keyboards and mice to reduce typing fatigue to aftermarket monitors that increase your workspace and external hard drives for more storage space, these peripherals are a simple and cost-effective way to show your PC the love it deserves.

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Sigh. I should have known this morning's Best Buy Netbook would sell out. Grumble, grumble. Well, here's something just as good, IMHO.

Dell has the Iomega 1TB Home Media Network Hard Drive for $114.99 shipped. That's one of the best NAS deals I've ever seen.

An NAS (network-attached storage) system is great for backing up and sharing media between multiple household computers. It also makes any selected data available over the Internet--nice for sharing, say, photo slideshows with distant relatives.

Be sure to read CNET's review of the Iomega drive and watch the above video. We liked the drive's easy setup and support for external USB drives and printers, but found it lacking in advanced features.

Still, for just a few bucks more than the price of a regular old 1TB external drive, you get a NAS that's far more versatile. Definitely worth a look if you're in the market for copious home-friendly storage.

Backup deal: Also at Dell, you can snag one of those Wasabi PZ310 pocket printers, plus a 48-pack of paper, for $39 shipped. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, these things are really fun. Splendid little gift item.

The new Momentus Thin laptop hard drive.

(Credit: Seagate)

At only 9.5mm, the regular 2.5-inch laptop hard drive is already very thin compared with the 25.4mm of the 3.5-inch desktop hard drive. But Seagate, one of the bigger hard-drive makers around, just decided to go even slimmer.

The company announced Monday the Momentus Thin, a new 2.5-inch-based laptop hard drive that's 25 percent thinner, at only 7mm. This reduction in thickness makes the new hard drive comparable, in physical size, to that of most solid state drives (SSDs) used in Netbooks and ultraportable computers. However, it retains the advantages of regular hard drives, which include much higher capacities and, most importantly, a much lower cost per gigabyte.

The Momentus Thin offers the same performance as a regular SATA 2.5-inch hard drive, which is faster than most low-end SSD used in Netbooks. The new drive comes in two capacities (250GB and 160GB); sports 8MB of cache memory, supports a SATA 3Gbps interface, and spins at 5400rpm.

The Mometus Thin uses the same type of cable and ports as a regular SATA 2.5-inch hard drive. This means it will also fit in any application where a 9.5mm hard drive is used. This makes it possible for users to upgrade their existing storage by themselves.

The new Momentus Thin 2.5-inch SATA hard drives will be available in January, with the 250GB version costing only $55. It's unclear how much the 160GB version will cost, but it will obviously be cheaper than its larger counterpart.

It's a match made in heaven: the Eye-Fi card and Google's Picasa.

(Credit: Eye-Fi)

About a month ago, Google made some serious price cuts to its Picasa Web photo-storage service. For example, a mere $5 per year now buys you 20GB of online storage.

In other news, Eye-Fi memory cards are really cool. They wirelessly upload photos from your camera to your PC OR online storage service of choice--like, say, Picasa.

Right now, if you sign up for a 200GB Picasa account for $50, you'll get a 4GB Eye-Fi Home card for free.

That card, which works in most digital cameras, normally sells for $69.99, so here's another way to look at the deal: Buy a 4GB Eye-Fi Home for $50, and get 200GB of Picasa storage for free.

Either way, I think it's a smokin' offer. Picasa effectively gives you an online backup of your entire photo library, along with basic slideshow, sharing, and print services.

I'm also an Eye-Fi fan, as manually copying photos from card to PC--and then PC to Web service--is a huge hassle. This is a great gift item, in my opinion.

This is a while-supplies-last offer, and I suspect it'll sell out quickly. So grab it while you can!

Backup deal: If you've been eyeballing "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" (and what avid gamer hasn't?) but unable to stomach the $60 price tag, the Microsoft Store has it for just $41.99 shipped. That's the lowest price I've seen anywhere.

Inside this shiny black monolith: a whopping 1.5 terabytes of storage.

(Credit: Dell)

Storage junkie that I am, I loved seeing terabyte hard drives dip below $100 this year, and then drop as low as $75.

Today we've reached another milestone: Dell has a Western Digital Elements 1.5-terabyte USB hard drive for $99.99 shipped. Yowza.

That's an awful lot of storage for less than $100. In fact, it's probably more than most people need, though I'd rather have too much space than too little.

The Elements sports a USB 2.0 interface. Curiously, Western Digital doesn't list the speed of the drive itself, which leads me to think it runs at 5,400 rpm, not 7,200. Consequently, it's probably not a performance dynamo, though I reckon it's fine for everyday tasks.

You can pair the drive with a Mac or Windows system; I believe it comes preformatted for the latter. (Thus, Mac users would need to reformat it, which is no biggie.)

The only real catch here is that Dell shows a ship time of "6+ weeks." Sheesh! Well, as long as you're not in a hurry, this is without a doubt the most bang you can get for your storage buck.

Bonus deal: Today only, you can get a refurbished Epson Stylus NX110 multifunction printer for just $19.99 shipped (with coupon code SAV40). Unreal, right? Amazingly, it includes a one-year warranty. Sadly, I've seen some fairly scathing user reviews of this model, so even at $20 it might not be worth it.

Data Robotics eSATA-enabled Drobo S

(Credit: Data Robotics)

Finally, it looks like the Drobo storage system I've been waiting for has arrived.

I've been struggling with the right way to deal with data as I move from a desktop machine with abundant internal storage to a laptop that can't fit my burgeoning photo library. Earlier four-drive Drobo models, with FireWire and USB ports, looked better at backup than storing live files I'd be using constantly.

But Monday, Data Robotics announced the Drobo S, a five-bay, $799 storage system that adds an eSATA connection to the mix.

Drobo systems use technology called BeyondRAID that stores data across a mixture of different drives. It offers redundancy and automatically rebuilds your files when you replace an older drive or add a new one that's more capacious. Drobos don't come cheap, but they offer longevity, and right now Amazon is selling 1.5-terabyte drives for $99.

So why should the prospect of dropping $1,000 on a storage system excite me? Because of eSATA. ... Read more

It's fair to say that so far Synology is the NAS maker with the fewest misses. Ever since the company joined the network storage arena in early 2008, it has earned three CNET Editors' Choice awards, with the newest one being the DS409Slim.

The new DS410j NAS server from Synology supports Time Machine.

(Credit: Synology)

Synology NAS servers offer a vast number of features; signature among those are the advanced surveillance system, sophisticated photo sharing/managing capability, and a robust user interface. And now Synolgoy has overcome one of its only former missteps: by adding support for Apple's Time Machine.

The company announced Wednesday the launch of its new four-bay NAS server, the DS410j. This new NAS server carries all the features of other Synolgoy NAS servers and, on top of that, support for Apple's popular backup solution. For the first time ever, Mac users can use Time Machine (available in Mac OS 10.5 and later) with a Synology NAS server. Currently, very few NAS servers on the market support this feature.

Beyond that update, according to Synology, the DS410j is designed for busy home networks and entry-level businesses. It can house four 3.5-inch SATA hard drives of up to 2TB each, making the total storage up to 8TB. Like other models, the DS410j supports multiple RAID configurations when used with two or more hard drives. It also comes with automated backup, remote file sharing, and multimedia streaming features and is fully DNLA-compliant.

The DS410j is available now both with and without hard drives. Its price varies depending on the configuration; however, like other Synogloy NAS servers, it will not be cheap. It seems that affordability is something that Synolgoy will continue to miss for a while.

There have always been fewer options in the enterprise-storage market than there have been in the consumer market. That's why it's significant that enterprise buyers now have another choice.

Western Digital announced Tuesday its entry into the enterprise market with the first shipments of its WD S25, 10,000rpm, 2.5-inch SAS interface hard drives.

The new WD S25 enterprise hard drive from Western Digital.

(Credit: Western Digital)

While high-end consumer-grade 2.5-inch SATA hard drives can spin at 7,200rpm, at 10,000rpm the new hard drive from Western Digital is still considered entry-level. This is because in the enterprise market, vendors such as Seagate already offer SAS-based hard drives that spin at 15,000rpm.

Nonetheless, according to Western Digital, the new WD S25 drive is still suitable for high-performance storage for mission-critical enterprise server and enterprise-storage applications, such as high-I/O-driven applications, data centers, and large data arrays. Each drive offers up to 300GB of storage space.

The WD S25 supports both the 3Gbps and the 6Gbps SAS interfaces and offers a sustained sequential data rate of 128MBps. In addition to having the speed needed for enterprise needs, the WD S25 also provides a mean time between failures (MTBF) rating of 1.6 million hours.

The WD S25 drive is available now. You won't be able to buy one for yourself, but chances are you'll find them in your new enterprise-storage gear.

G-Tech's new 2TB 7200 rpm-based external storage devices.

(Credit: G-Tech)

It's not hard these days to find external storage devices that offer 2TB or even 4TB of storage. However, most of them use low-power and relatively low-performance internal hard drives, such as the My Book series from Western Digital or the FreeAgent series from Seagate. If you are looking for top speed and top capacity form external storage solutions for your Mac, G-Tech has some news for you.

The company announced Monday that it now incorporates Hitachi's 2TB, 7,200rpm, 32MB cache buffer SATA hard drives across its entire 3.5-inch product line, offering different storage solutions from single-volume external hard drive to RAID systems, with capacities ranging from 2TB to 32TB.

The company's newly refreshed products include the G-DRIVE, G-SAFE, G-RAID, G-SPEED eS, G-SPEED eS Pro, G-SPEED eS PRO XL, and the G-SPEED FC XL. With these new products, G-Tech claims that it's now the first in the world that offers a complete line of 2TB, 7,200 RPM drive-based external storage solutions, specifically designed for the Mac computer and audio- and video-editing markets.

G-Tech's new storage solutions comes with virtually all existing connections, from USB 2.0, FireWire and eSATA for desktop external drives to miniSAS and Fibre Channel for high-end RAID storage systems. The fact that now it uses the top 2TB capacity hard drives means that customers can significantly increase the amount of storage while retaining the same physical footprint.

The new G-Tech external storage devices are available now with premium prices ranging from $379 for the simple desktop 2TB G-Drive, $3,599 for the high-end 8TB G-Speed eS Pro to tens of thousands of dollars for other high-end storage systems.