OCZ has just released a new firmware for its Indilinx Everest-based Octane lineup. On the plus side, it should significantly boost performance in the IOPS department, on the downside it will wipe your drive. This is what OCZ itself calls a “destructive” update, so cloning the drive before moving ahead with the update sounds like [...]
We recently mentioned a critical bug in Crucial’s popular m4 solid state drive. As promised, Crucial is now delivering a fix that should definitely be applied to any and all drives in the series for data security reasons. The firmware bug is a very odd one; it potentially induces reboots and BSODs in Windows after [...]
[UPDATE: Fix now available] There’s unfortunately no lack of weird SSD firmware bugs–not even good-old, trustworthy Intel is apparently free of these problems. Now it appears that another drive that is generally considered reliable–the popular Crucial m4–has been spared. On the company’s support forums there are reports of units causing blue screens after about 5,000 [...]
External hard drives are mostly used for backup purposes, mainly because their performance hasn’t been up to speed. But with the advent of USB 3.0 in combination with speedy SSDs, there is ample cause for reconsidering this usage pattern for the external drive. The brand new Storage Pod Mini from Super Talent is an example [...]
Hard drive prices went through the roof after flooding in Thailand a couple of months ago, but now they appear to be on the decline again. Unfortunately, warranty periods are also declining for many of the most popular models from Western Digital and Seagate.
OCZ is launching a new ‘Petrol’-series SSD based on the Indilinx controller (now owned by OCZ) which is also present in the (also relatively new) Octane series. By utilizing their own controller instead of the ones from SandForce that OCZ has been relying on for quite some time, the manufacturer claims a reduction in development [...]
STEC has just released a new SSD for the enterprise market called ZeusIOPS XE, which is allegedly three times more durable than previous MLC-based drives (the ‘XE’ in the name refers to “Extreme Endurance”). This has been achieved using a fourth-generation controller and new error correction code to provide at least 30 total rewrites a [...]
Kingston has been looking in its crystal ball and foresees a strong increase in SSD storage next year. The memory manufacturer thinks that prices in 2012 will drop down to one dollar per gigabyte, which isn’t much of a stretch if you consider the lower production costs (and durability) that comes with smaller manufacturing technology. [...]
Why settle for a single SSD when you can have two running in RAID 0, providing almost double the performance of a single drive configuration? Well actually there’s a reason why many have refrained from doing just that, namely the lack of TRIM support in RAID setups. But now it looks like Intel is about [...]
The already overcrowded market with near-identical SSDs based on the SandForce SF-2281 controller is getting yet another contender. Zalman, the Korean manufacturer of all sorts of odds and ends for your computer, is introducing its new F-series SSDs–a collection of 2.5-inch drives built around the high-end SandForce SF-2281 chip The first three models will be [...]
