The Price: US$599 for 500GB, US$399 for 100GB. Monthly service is US$24.95, US$249 for 1 year, US$499 for 2 years, and US$998 for 5 years.

The Verdict: It works. The network interface is only a 10/100, not Gigabit, so transferring stuff to the drive isn’t all that fast. However, that’s not the point of the Datto. You’re not using this as an extra storage drive that you move stuff onto or off of every day, you’re using this as a backup for your more important documents and files. Storing your home business docs, tax records, or whatever irreplaceable (vacation pics?) files you’ve got lying around so that you can get it back in case your kid sets fire to your house.

The only possible problem with this is that uploading 500GB of data takes a long time on a standard cable or DSL connection. It’s not an issue when all your data’s already on their servers and you’re just updating a file or two here or there, but the first upload can take days, if not weeks, depending on your internet speed. You can have them do a roundtrip shipment of the device, manually doing a dump of your drive into their servers and sending your unit back.

If your device fails, Datto will ship your data back to you in under 24 hours. It may not be for everyone, but if you’ve got some important data or you’re running a business at home, you should definitely consider it as an easy offsite backup solution. [Datto]