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 [...]
For those with an SSD from Intel, it might be of interest to know that Intel has released a new version of its helper app SSD Toolbox, which has now reached version 3.0. It’s a versatile little tool that can be used to maintain and diagnose Intel’s own storage devices. The news in the Intel [...]
A-DATA has also jumped on the SandForce bandwagon and recently launched the S511–yet another drive for the crowded SSD market based on the SF-2281 controller. Now it is now expanding the lineup with an mSATA device called XM13. What is mSATA, you ask? It’s like SATA, but smaller. These small SSDs with a Z68 mSATA [...]
OCZ continues to sell SSDs like hotcakes and continues to invest in new products, usually with the SandForce processor as the weapon of choice, but as some of you might rember, OCZ acquired Indilinx a while back, and here is the first result of the acquisition Whereas the extremely popular Vertex 3, Agiliy 3 and [...]
