The Ativa Professional Plus HDPro 2000 ($279.99) is a bit of a diamond in the rough. It's not the fastest-rated shredder for personal or small business use, and it fell short of its rated speed in my testing. But it has good paper capacity, and, more importantly, it can shred continuously for up to two hours without needing time to cool off, so it can churn through many more pages at a sitting than some faster shredders. Its combination of paper capacity, run time, compactness, and ease of use earn it our Editors' Choice as a shredder for small or home offices.

Ativa is an Office Depot brand, and Ativa shredders are primarily sold by that chain. The shredder is reasonably compact at 22.8 by 15 by 12.6 inches (HWD). On top, near the 9-inch-wide feeder slot, the shredder has touch-sensitive controls that are lit by green LEDs, for On, Forward, and Reverse, plus warning lights that go on in case of a paper jam or if the 7.1-gallon basket is full.

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This model is a cross-cut shredder that cuts paper into narrow shreds of about 1.4 by 0.19 inches, which is small enough to be reasonably secure in shredding business documents. In addition to paper, it can cut CDs, paper clips, staples, and credit cards. It's relatively quiet when shredding paper, though noisy when shredding CDs.

Office Depot lists the HDPro 2000's paper capacity at 20 sheets; in my testing, it could hold 22 and still shred. The company lists a maximum shred speed of 12 feet per minute (fpm); I timed it an average of 8.7 fpm. It's rated to shred continuously for up to two hours without needing a cooling-off period, so it could theoretically shred up to 22,800 sheets in this period. In reality, it's the people who are shredding that need a chilling-out period, as well as time to empty the basket, but it's clear that this shredder can mulch a prodigious amount of paper in one session.

The Staples 16-Sheet High-Speed Cross-Cut Shredder has greater raw speed—I timed it at 14.7 fpm—and good paper capacity (I could fit 20 sheets without it jamming), but it could shred continuously for a mere 8 minutes straight before it needed a 40-minute cool-down. It's a good choice if you need to shred documents in a hurry, but for higher-volume shredding, the HDPro 2000 leaves it in a cloud of paper dust. The Swingline Stack-and-Shred 300X Hands Free Shredder , a high-end model best suited for use in workgroups of up to 10 people, is the height of convenience in a shredder. You just insert a stack of up to 300 documents in its auto-feed tray, close the lid, and it does the rest. It is relatively slow, however, and for all the Swingline 300X's convenience, the HDPro 2000 can shred documents much more quickly.

The Ativa HDPro 2000 brings to mind the fable of the Tortoise and the Hare. I don't mean to imply that the HDPro 2000 is particularly slow, but just like the reptile in that tale, it soldiers on while faster shredders have to take a breather (or three). And by the end of the race, it has churned through many more documents than they did. The Ativa Professional Plus HDPro 2000 crosses the finish line ahead of the pack, to become our first Editors' Choice as a document shredder for personal, home-office, or very small-office use.