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.
A couple of weeks back, Intel announced a slew of new solid state drives, targeting a wide array of market segments, that leverage 3D TLC NAND. One of those offerings was a new series of M.2 NVMe drives, dubbed the SSD 600P. According to Intel, the SSD 600P series is “designed to deliver PCIe performance at near-SATA prices”. To date, most NVMe PCIe solid state drives are roughly 1.5 – 3x the cost per gigabyte of SATA based drives, due to the inherent performance benefits and likely the added cost of NVMe controllers. But, as the company has done a number of times in the past dating all the way back to the venerable X25, Intel is pushing hard to drive down prices in the segment. In fact, the...
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Thumb drive makers have managed to cram quite a bit into the pinky-sized drives, but there are limits to capacity and to some degree performance, since there is only so much room to work with. Fortunately, there is a nice middle ground between thumb drives and larger external SSDs that conform to the popular 2.5" form factor. EMTEC, for example, has a new line of external SSDs that use a 1.8" form factor, which offer respectable read speeds, although they won't win any performance contests versus more expensive drives. The EMTEC Speedin' X600 is a USB 3.0-compatible drive available in 128GB, 256GB or 512GB capacities at affordable price points. And at just 94 x 54 x 12 mm and 50g in...
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Micron announced its 9100 Series NVMe enterprise-class solid state drive back in April. The drives come in multiple flavors and form factors, with the Micron 9100 PRO series targeting read-centric environments, while the 9100 MAX targets mixed-use cases. Capacities for the drives in the Micron 9100 series range from 800GB on up to 3.2TB, though all of the drives are outfitted with similar controllers and NAND.Although news of the drives has been circulating for a couple of months now, it was just recently that we got our hands on one for some in-house testing. We’ve been experimenting with a Micron 9100 MAX 2.4TB HHHL NVMe drive for a couple of weeks and will detail its performance on the pages...
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Toshiba OCZ is at the ready with a brand new NVMe solid state drive, targeted squarely at the high-performance enthusiast computing market. We first caught a glimpse of the drive we’re going to be showing you here today, the OCZ RD400, back at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. OCZ had the drive on display – branded the RevoDrive 400 at the time – blazing through some benchmarks at over 2.6GB/s.It took a bit of tweaking and fine tuning to get the drive ready for market, but it’s here now, and as you’ll see on the pages ahead, the RD400 was worth the short wait.Like the last couple of OCZ solid state drives we’ve looked at recently, the new RD400 is packing all Toshiba-made, proprietary...
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Samsung leveraged its extensive NAND flash and storage IP and took aim at the high-performance portable storage market last year when it launched its impressive Portable SSD T1 external drive. There are countless portable flash drives and a multitude of external storage enclosures on the market that can house any standard 2.5” SSD. However, the Samsung Portable SSD T1 was something a little bit different. The T1 was somewhat of a tweener product that was significantly lighter and more compact than a typical external back-up drive, while offering performance closer to an internally-connected SSD. We evaluated the T1 last year and really liked the product due to its sleek form factor and relatively...
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The last time we saw OCZ, there were tearing up CES with an upcoming NVMe solid state drive that could transfer data at upwards of 2.7GB/s that was featured alongside a few new SATA-based solutions, like the Trion 150 series we’ll be showing you here today.The OCZ Trion 150 is an update to last summer’s Trion 100, which was the first drive from OCZ to feature TLC NAND and all in-house, Toshiba-built technology. The Trion 100 series of drives proved to be good performers overall, especially considering their relatively affordable price points. As its branding suggests, the new Trion 150 kicks things up a few notches over the Trion 100, thanks to some cutting edge 15nm NAND flash memory and a tweaked...
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Netgear has released a new line of high-end-yet-consumer-friendly Network Attached Servers (NAS) dubbed the RN210 family. They are available in both two-and-four bay models, and this time around we’ll be examining its two-bay model, the RN212. Keep in mind, however, that almost everything we cover here applies to the four-bay model as well, which goes by the moniker RN214. The big deal with this NAS is that, according to Netgear, it’s the “only ARM-based NAS that delivers full HD 1080p to 480p transcoding,” with the purpose being the ability to stream content from the NAS to your smart phone or tablet without any dropped frames. Another notable is that it uses the BTRFS file system, which...
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Solid State Drive technology continues to make big strides in performance, reliability and cost. And of course, at CES 2016 there were a number of storage manufacturers on hand showing off their latest grear, though none made quite the splash that Toshiba's OCZ Technology group made with the annoucement of their new RevoDrive 400 NVMe PCI Express SSD. With this new drive, OCZ is tapping on Toshiba's NVMe controller technology to deliver serious bandwidth in this consumer-targeted M.2 gumstick style drive that also comes with a X4 PCI Express card adapater. OCZ didn't offer much detail on the controller other than to say it was Toshiba IP on board and supports the full NVMe 1.1b specification....
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The rapid pace of innovation in the solid state storage market shows no signs of letting up. In only a few generations, the industry bumped up against the limits of the legacy SATA interface, and began leveraging PCI Express for additional bandwidth with some passable, though somewhat clunky bridged solutions (in retrospect). Then some ultra-fast, native PCI Express offerings hit, and have since evolved into multiple form factors, including slotted and gumstick models, with varying physical interfaces.Some of the more recent introductions, like the excellent Intel SSD 750, feature many of the latest innovations, like PCI Express, the latest NAND controllers, and support for NVMe, or Non-Volatile...
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Major players in the solid state storage business continue to innovate at a breakneck pace, especially now that the market has begun a shift away from the lowly SATA interface towards higher performing alternatives like PCI Express. For a while, manufacturers were bolting multiple SATA controllers together on single devices, in RAID configurations, to boost performance beyond what a single SATA-based drive could do. But with the advent of NVMe, that’s no longer necessary for most applications. Though, pairing up multiple NVMe devices can also be a means to increase performance, of course.Just to give a quick refresher, NVM Express or NVMe, is a low-latency, scalable host controller interface...
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Today, Intel is taking the wraps off new NVMe PCI Express Solid State Drives, which are the first products with these high speed interfaces that the company has launched specifically for the enthusiast computing and workstation crowds. Historically, Intel's PCI Express-based offerings, like the SSD DC P3700 Series, have been squarely targeted for datacenter or enterprise applications, with price tags to match. However, today Intel is throwing performance enthusiasts another bone with the launch of the Intel SSD 750 series. We've historically been big on PCI Express SSDs here, because they get around the SATA bottleneck that holds many standard 2.5-inch SATA Solid State Drives down at around 550MB/sec...
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Prices for solid state drives have fallen precipitously over the past year. This is especially true when shopping 2.5-inch form factor SATA SSDs, which is where some of the best values in solid state storage are currently found. That's certainly true of Micron's Crucial brand MX200 line, two of which we have in for review here. First announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas earlier this year, the MX200 series debuted in three capacities -- 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB, each priced at under 50 cents per gigabyte. Crucial set the MSRPs at $140 for the 250GB model, $250 for the 500GB SKU, and $470 for the 1TB drive, all three of which are available for considerably less online. At...
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If you’re still rocking a 1TB or even 2TB hard drive on your PC, you’re probably starting to feel squeezed by that capacity ceiling sneaking closer and closer. Game download sizes are swelling with the addition of ever-increasing detail and 4K textures (Star Citizen is rumored to exceed 100GB) and content producers can never have enough space to store and edit their digital creations. If you’re looking for a seriously roomy new hard drive or three, Western Digital has you covered with today’s launch of the WD Black 6TB HDD and the NAS-friendly WD Red Pro 6TB. They're also launching 5TB versions of each, but we'll take the maximum storage allowed by law, thank you very much. The newest hard...
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"This is something many people thought was impossible," exclaimed Intel Senior Vice President Rob Crooke. During an invite-only press conference, Crooke along with Micron CEO Mark Durcan revealed a radically new class of storage and memory architecture called 3D XPoint (pronounced "Cross Point"). To say this is a game-changer would be the understatement of the year. Tangible products based on the technology will debut in 2016, but today's event was focused on the development partnership between Intel and Micron. Frankly, what they've accomplished is astounding. Even though we’re finally on the cusp of Solid State storage breaking into mainstream adoption (e.g. becoming more affordable and more...
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