Seagate slim hard drive

The Seagate Seven is by far the thinnest external hard drive on the market, and chances are good you'd want it for the cool design alone.

Supporting USB 3.0, the drive also delivers fast performance, and it includes helpful backup software for both Windows and Mac. It's also rugged and quite eye-catching.

There's a catch, though. The drive has only 500GB of storage space and carries a price tag of $100. (Pricing for the UK and Australia is not yet available, but the US tab converts to around £65 and AU$125.) That's very expensive considering you can now buy a 2TB portable drive for the same price.

The Seagate Seven looks like no other external drive I've seen. In fact, it looks a lot like an internal hard drive.

The name Seven was chosen to show off the drive's thickness, which is just 7mm, the same as that of a thin standard internal laptop drive. To put this in perspective, most standard (2.5-inch) internal laptop hard drives are actually 9.5mm thick. To achieve this new profile, the Seven hosts an internal drive that measures just 5mm.

The Seven's chassis is made out of hardened aluminum. Apart from making the external drive look similar to an internal one, the chassis also protects the drive inside from shocks and especially crush damage. Seagate says the Seven can survive drops of up to TK, and even being run over by a small car. The drive does feel very rugged and despite being super thin, it's impossible to bend it.