Computer Storage Products Reviews And News
Internal, external, hard drives or SSD -- you need somewhere to store your files, images and media. And don't forget to back-up early and often. Here we cover computer storage products of all types like Solid State Drives (SSD), good old spinning Hard Drives, external storage devices and network attached storage (NAS) devices.
There's an old cliche' that seems to ring true with respect to the onslaught of SSD technology we've been treated to in the market over the past year or so, "there's always another one coming." Solid State Drive technologies are advancing so quickly, that some manufacturers don't even get a chance to let the ink dry on product labeling...
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Western Digital recently began to ship a new series of Caviar hard drives that included the company's Advanced Format technology. The new Caviar Green models are nearly identical to their standard brethren, but offer double the cache (64MB instead of 32MB at 1-2TB) and have a different model number. A WD10EARS is an Advanced Format drive;...
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Looking at current solid state drive market, it's easy to draw some parallels with the early days of 3D on the PC. When 3D graphics cards first hit the scene (before the term GPU was coined), there were only a few major players, i.e. 3dfx, Tseng Labs, S3, etc. As the technology was more accepted by consumers, however, numerous other manufactures,...
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What's this? Yet another SSD product from OCZ Technology? It's not like the company doesn't already have a staggeringly large selection of solid state drives of both the MLC and SLC varieties, with various controllers under the hood and even a RAID-driven, PCI Express based line-up. You wouldn't want another SSD from...
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IM Flash Technologies is a joint venture between Intel and Micron that is targeted for producing NAND flash memory. With a focus on research and development, IMFT has doubled NAND density approximately every 18 months. In 2006, they started production with a 50nm process, then moved to a 40nm process in 2008. This co-development inevitably...
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Today we stopped by Storage Vision 2010 and spoke with Crucial / Micron about their upcoming products. They had an impressive SSD on display with jaw dropping performance numbers. Here's the scoop. Crucial RealSSD C300The Micron and or Crucial RealSSD C300 with be sold under both brand names and is...
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When shopping for an SSD, consumers are confronted with two general options: single-level cell (SLC) or multi-level cell (MLC) flash memory based drives. The market is filled with numerous drives featuring MLC chips that are primarily aimed at more mainstream users. These products are typically less expensive and offer larger capacities than...
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It happens to all of us at some point. We constantly run short of hard drive space, no matter how incredibly cavernous you thought your current drive was when you bought it. Did you really expect Dragon Age: Origins and Borderlands to soak up almost thirty gigabytes between them? Didn't think so. You either shove Office 2007 and...
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It's rare we get genuinely excited around here about a product. To be honest, likely we're spoiled by all the bleeding-edge technology we have the great opportunity to look at week in and week out. Or perhaps it's just that we're jaded a bit and have heard one too many marketing pitches, but truth be told it takes a lot...
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In all of our recent solid state disk (SSD) coverage that featured one of Intel's X25-M drives, a common, underlying performance trend consistently emerged. The Intel drives were always amongst the top performers in read performance, and were unquestionably the best with regard to random writes. However, in sequential write performance...
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Network-attached storage (NAS) devices come in all shapes and sizes; some even come without hard drives--with the intention that the users will add the drives themselves. There is even a relatively new category of NAS devices that don't have any internal drives at all, and instead use USB-attached drives as their storage source. These NAS...
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An interesting thing about NAND Flash SSD (Solid State Drive) technologies, beyond the fact that the market is flush with competitive product offerings, is that the technology itself is very flexible and adaptable to a number of different design approaches, other just the straight-forward SATA-based SSDs. Take for example the...
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Solid State storage products continue to evolve at a rapid pace. Over the last year or so, solid state drives, or SSDs, specifically targeted at PC enthusiasts have transformed from buggy, underperforming products to the preferred, high-end storage solution for performance hungry enthusiasts and even more mission critical applications. Available...
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Upgrading your notebook's legacy hard drive to a new, fast SSD is a substantial upgrade that makes good sense for a number of reasons. First, Solid State Drives offer orders of magnitude higher performance under certain conditions, with blazingly fast random access times. They also produce much less heat versus a standard 2.5-inch...
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With the growing popularity of cloud-based storage solutions, such as the Amazon S3 and Nirvanix services, many businesses--both large and small--are eschewing traditional onsite file servers, and instead opting for offsite, third-party storage solutions. But the ongoing cost of maintaining cloud-based storage as well as the often unproven...
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Regardless of their size or industry, most businesses depend on ready and secure access to their data. To a business, "secure" means that its data is protected from hardware or software failures and is safe from prying eyes. But small and even some medium-sized businesses often can't afford to maintain a data center, let alone a dedicated...
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When Intel released their first generation 50nm SSD product, the market buzzed with appreciation for the product and its overall performance profile. We in fact took you through the ins and outs of Intel's new MLC-based Solid State Drive product line-up for the consumer market and agreed it was one of the fastest on the market at the time. ...
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Although the worldwide economy may be shrinking, our needs as consumers to store large amounts of data continues to grow at a breakneck pace. Whereas only a few years ago it was uncommon for most PC users to have more than just a few digital images or media files, today virtually every aspect of our lives has some sort of digital component....
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For many, just the thought of setting up and using a network attached storage (NAS) device makes their eyes cross and their pulses increase. While even the technophobic recognize the benefits of having a network-based repository of files for sharing and backup, the concept can still seem daunting to some. The reality is that NAS devices have...
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Disruptive technology; it's a term thrown around these days by industry marketing types and quite frankly it's just plain getting worn out as of late. In the mid 90s, a Harvard Business School Professor coined this phrase to describe a product innovation that breaks current convention and exceeds market expectations so vastly that market...
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QNAP, purveyor of Network Attached Storage devices large and small, has just recently introduced what it's calling the world's most affordable NAS server with iSCSI. The device they speak of is the single-bay TS-119 Turbo Pro, which we've taken into our labs and scoped out across the pages to come. The device itself is just marginally larger...
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Windows 7 is undoubtedly the most exciting new operating system to come out of Microsoft within the past decade--and with good reason. The user interface is superb, gone are many of the oddball Vista quirks, and the operating system is light and snappy, marking a massive 180 degree shift away from the heaviness and bloat of Vista. Despite...
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