There’s a lot of shiny and flashy gadgets and home entertainment devices that will entice most of the population during the holidays – cameras, music players, camcorders and tablets are sure to be this season’s top sellers once again. But once gift recipients start to create content, listen to music, download apps or record videos, they will eventually need a good, safe and reliable digital place to store their stuff. That’s where storage comes in – it’s not always the sexiest product category, but there’s a lot of new innovations in storage that we think will make good gifts as well:

The minimum "best practice" backup arrangement for your vital data is to maintain three copies of the data: the original, a local backup, and a second backup offsite. With LaCie's CloudBox NAS device, you simply back up to the ethernet-connected unit, which then automatically backs up to LaCie's own online backup service. But easy as it is, CloudBox is also expensive, capacity-challenged, and slower than average.

A new wireless NAS device from LaCie not only stores up to 2TB of data, it also is a wireless router and a video streaming center. For less than Apple's Time Capsule. How does it stack up?

Both LaCie and Iomega have introduced pocket-sized USB drives that use the speedy new USB 3.0 standard for transferring data. But why should you go with one manufacturer over the other?

LaCie has announced the latest addition to its Rugged family of mobile hard drives: the LaCie Rugged USB 3.0; combining the fast speeds of USB 3.0 and the company's rugged design. LaCie says that the Rugged USB 3.0 is one the most power-efficient and fast-performing mobile hard drives offered by the company.

Sling Media's small Slingbox 700U won one of three Best in Show awards given by the Industrial Designers Society of America (ISDA).