Gear Guide, part four: Gear for the desktop

A Mac on your desk gives you a pretty powerful workstation-but also a pretty barren one. The products in the final installment of our Gear Guide can help spruce up your workspace while also helping you get more creative, store more data, and finish more work.

Review: Toshiba USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive 400GBToshiba’s USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive is a serviceable drive with a few tradeoffs. Performance-minded users will see the Toshiba’s USB-only connectivity as a limitation.
Newer introduces quad interface hard drive dockThe NewerTech Voyager dock allows you to plug in any 2.5- or 3.5-inch hard disk and then connect it to your Mac.

Review: Toshiba USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive 400GB Toshiba’s USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive is a serviceable drive with a few tradeoffs. Performance-minded users will see the Toshiba’s USB-only connectivity as a limitation.
Review: G-Technology G-Drive mini portable hard drive The G-Drive mini is portable drive that offers connectivity flexibility. And if you need zippy data transfers, the G-Drive mini is an ideal choice.
Review: SimpleTech [re]drive external hard drive SimpleTech's [re]drive’s status as an environmentally conscious product makes it more enticing than many similarly priced 500GB drives, and it’s more aesthetically pleasing than your standard external drive.
Review: FreeAgent Go for Mac portable hard drive The FreeAgent Go is an external hard drive that promises fast FireWire 800 transfer speeds, spacious storage, and a stylish (if bulky) white and aluminum design meant to compliment the Mac.
Review: FreeAgent Desk for Mac external hard drive Thanks to the FireWire 800 connection speed, the FreeAgent Desk is a respectably fast external drive. Seagate has produced a fast, competitively priced, and Mac-centric external drive that should satisfy your storage needs.

Connect: How to add network attached storage If you need to back up multiple Macs or share media files on your home (or small-business) network, you might need more than a USB drive attached to your AirPort base station or Time Capsule. Kirk McElhearn explains why network attached storage might be a better solution.
Upgrading a MacBook Pro's hard drive Unsure about upgrading a MacBook Pro's hard drive? Here are a couple of helpful resources.
Bugs & Fixes: The trouble with USB ‘smart’ flash drives Ted Landau discovers that the new generation of U3 smart drives can cause a lot of headaches for Mac users.
In case of emergency In a summer full of natural disasters how prepared are you (and your Mac) for unanticipated emergencies?
Time Machine tips and troubleshooting Some people will be able to set up and turn on Time Machine with a single click. But you may need to do some manual configuration to get it to work the way you want. You should also be aware of some quirks in Time Machine’s operation, particularly when restoring data.

The book of MacBook After a week with Apple's newest MacBook, Dan Moren has compiled a long list of observations, thoughts, and general meandering on the consumer portable.
Do you LightScribe? Lab Director James Galbraith wonders whether anyone actually uses LightScribe for creating disk labels.
Bugs & Fixes: Resolving confusion with LaCie’s drive updates Trying to update his LaCie d2 DVD±RW drive, Ted Landau came across some convoluted Update Tools for the external drive.
PC World: Some things weren't in the air at Expo Apple's tagline for the just-concluded Macworld Expo was "There's something in the air." But for everything that was "in the air" this past week, there were pre-show rumors that didn't pan out, products that didn't receive enough attention, and announcements ripe for second-guessing.
The 23rd Annual Editors' Choice Awards Every year, Macworld editors see a mass of products, and every year, a few emerge from the crowd because of their innovation, value, or quality. Those are the ones that capture our annual Eddy Awards, given to our favorite products of the year. In 2007, 32 products caught our fancy. See if our favorites match yours.