There are gobs of external storage products on the market that serve a variety of needs. You can find big drives for backing up data in your home and you can find small drives for backing up data on the road.

Toshiba has announced that it is now in the external storage solution market with a drive using 3.5-inch HDDs for the desktop market. The drive will be offered with 640GB of storage and 1TB of storage. Both versions will offer USB 2.0 and eSATA connectivity.

If you walk into a home or office where a computer is, present odds are you are going to find some sort of external storage solution. More often than not computer users resort to USB external hard drives to back up their data and to store files.

Western Digital has announced that its My Book line of external hard drives is now available with 2TB of storage in a single disk model. That means that big storage takes up less space on or under your desk. The new 2TB disk is available in the My Book Studio, Mac Edition, Home Edition, and Essential Edition models.

Anyone who creates media in the home or office from home movies or professional video needs storage that keeps the video safe and secure. The problem with some external storage solutions is that the devices are too slow to stream the video and writing large files to the devices can take a long time.

QNAP has announced what it claims to be the world’s first iSCSI NAS devices with single and dual bays. The interface offers improved performance compared to many external solutions on the market. The TS-119 is a single bay NAS device while the TS-219 is a dual bay device. Both use a 1.2GHz CPU, 512MB DDR2 RAM and up to 8 iSCSI devices can be daisy chained.

Last summer Iomega unveiled a product providing what many DVR owners find themselves needing much sooner than they thought — more storage space. The Iomega DVR Extender is an external 500GB hard drive that connects to DVRs via eSATA.

Iomega announced today that users of Pace set-top cable boxes can now use the DVR Expander to add up to 300 hours of storage for standard def programs and up to 60 hours of HD content. The most interesting part of the announcement is that if users have Pace boxes that lack a hard drive, the DVR Expander will turn them into full featured DVRs.

One of the products that I see a lot of each year at CES is external storage solutions. The usual companies like Seagate and other places offer a full line of external solutions, but it never ceases to impress me at the number of small firms I have not heard of that offer external storage.

One of the smaller firms, which I have heard of before, called Verbatim has announced a pair of new external hard drives that feature fast 7200 rpm 3.5-inch hard drives inside small enclosures. The drives feature quad interfaces and work with Mac and Windows computers.

It’s just not cool to drop lots of cash on a svelte notebook like the MacBook Air and then have to pair it with an ugly, fat, and plain external hard drive that is just too ugly to be associated with a MacBook Air. The good news for you is that Iomega has a new hard drive that is the perfect Air external drive.

The USB 2.0 hard drive is called the Iomega eGo Helium Portable Hard Drive. The drive is encased in aluminum, the same shiny hue as the Air, and shares the Air’s thin profile. The Helium is a mere 16mm thick and weighs only 7 ounces. Inside the thin case is a 2.5-inch 320GB hard drive.

Everything seems to be going environmentally friendly today. You can get shirts made from recycled coke bottles at Wal-Mart if you want. Automakers are also spending billions to bring electric vehicles and alternative fuel vehicles to our roads. Even our computers are going green with hard drives that need less power.

Fabrik has announced what it claims to be the world’s most eco-friendly external hard drive today. The drive is called the SimpleTech [re]drive and it is said to be the world’s most energy-efficient, resource conscious external storage and backup drive. The drive uses Turbo USB 2.0 to connect to your PC, promising 25% more transfer speed than USB 2.0 alone.

I’m a more traditional geek and tend to not want any bright colors in my external storage products. I guess there are enough people out there that feel differently and Western Digital has felt the need to glam up the common USB drive with bright and often girly colors.

Western Digital announced today that it was now offering its popular My Passport drive in 11 different colors. The available colors include black, brilliant orange, super sunny yellow, raindrop blue, arctic white, deep viola, cherry red, ultra mint, real red, intense blue, and vibrant pink. The white drive might be just the thing for Mac heads, at least until the new MacBook’s hit with the aluminum skin.