Items tagged with disk
Just a few short weeks after the release of its high-end WildFire-branded solid state drives, Patriot is at the ready with a new family of drives, dubbed Pyro. Like the WildFire, the similarly fire lovin’ Pyro is built around SandForce’s sought after SF-2200 series solid state storage processor. But with this newer series of drives, Patriot has paired the controller to less expensive asynchronous NAND flash memory. This pairing results in a much more affordable solid state drive that offers very similar performance to higher-end models with synchronous NAND flash memory in the vast majority of scenarios. There are exceptions, however... Patriot Pyro SATA III Solid State Drive Review...
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Just a few short weeks after the release of its high-end WildFire-branded solid state drives, Patriot is at the ready with a new family of drives, dubbed Pyro. Like the WildFire, the similarly fire lovin’ Pyro is built around SandForce’s sought after SF-2200 series solid state storage processor. But with this newer series of drives, Patriot has paired the controller to less expensive asynchronous NAND flash memory. This pairing results in a much more affordable solid state drive that offers very similar performance to higher-end models with synchronous NAND flash memory in the vast majority of scenarios. There are exceptions, however, which we’ll show you on the pages ahead....
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OCZ Technology Introduces Summit Series SSDsOffering a Premium Storage Solution with Ultimate Compatibility and Reliability San Jose, Calif. — May 19, 2009 — OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory and computer components, today released the highly anticipated Summit Series 2.5” Solid State Drives, tailored to meet the stringent demands of business professionals, enthusiasts, and entry-level enterprise applications. Building on their premium flash-based storage solutions, OCZ’s Summit Series strives to bridge the gap between the needs of high-end gaming and professional desktops and notebooks to small scale server PCs that...
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The SSD market is incredibly hot at the moment. Not only is there a consistent influx of new products that seemingly leapfrog the previous generation in nearly every way, but already established products have been treated to firmware updates that enhance their performance and capabilities as well.Over the course of the last few months, we rounded up a number of solid state drives and featured products from Intel, OCZ, and others independently. Ultimately, we found that Intel's X25-M series of drives was the current kingpin in terms of overall performance, but since our initial look, a slew of new drives have hit the market and Intel has updated the X25-M's firmware to eliminate a potential performance...
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SANDISK INTRODUCES ExtremeFFS – NEW FLASH MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR IMPROVING SSD PERFORMANCE AND RELIABILITY SanDisk Also Proposes Two Metrics for End-Users to Measure Performanceand Endurance: virtualRPM (vRPM) and Long-Term Data Endurance (LDE) ExtremeFFS™ greatly accelerates SSD random write speeds and endurance vRPM allows consumers to measure and compare SSD and hard disk drive performance Industry encouraged to adopt a simple endurance metric to determine the lifespan of an SSD LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, Nov. 5, 2008 —SanDisk® Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK) today unveiled an advanced flash file system for solid-state drives (SSDs) that yields dramatic improvement in performance and reliability...
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Remember SanDisk’s new SlotMusic format that we told you about last month? Well, the world’s four largest music companies will begin shipping almost 40 music albums in this format this week. Additional albums are planned for the Christmas season.Although we initially heard prices in the $7 - $10 range, recent news is saying a 1GB microSD memory card containing MP3 files will cost $14.99. Keep in mind, these tunes are DRM-free, so that’s a plus.Best Buy will be getting their albums this week, while Walmart shoppers will have to wait another week or two. These retailers also carry the SanDisk Sansa-branded SlotMusic players, which start at about $20. There will also be artist-branded players that...
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It's no secret that music sales comprised of physical media (i.e. CDs) are down in the face of huge competition from iTunes and other digital distribution channels. At the same time, no one ever said the record labels would give up on physical sales easily. Today SanDisk, along with the four major record labels (Warner Bros., EMI, Sony BMG and Universal Music Group) have announced a new format: slotMusic. slotMusic is essentially a microSD card with an album on it, and the partners plan to roll it out in time for the holiday season.According to the format's official site, Wal-Mart and Best Buy are already lined up to stock the cards.With slotMusic, songs will be loaded onto what are...
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Solid-State drives (SSDs) have had a lot of coverage lately, mostly negative. Battery life, performance, reliability, those sorts of things have been under close scrutiny of late. Monday, in Sandisk's earnings call, Sandisk placed the blame for at least one of those issues squarely on Microsoft's shoulders. Eli Harari, Chairman and CEO of Sandisk, when asked about how his company plans to increase adoption rates of SSDs, said (emphasis ours):As soon as you get into Vista applications in notebook and desktop, you start running into very demanding applications because Vista is not optimized for Flash memory solid state disk. And the next generation controllers needs to basically compensate for...
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For those of you who use devices with SDHC support such as the Eee PC, it appears that SanDisk has a late Christmas gift for you: 32GB SDHC cards.“Giving photo enthusiasts the freedom to take more pictures and shoot more video, SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK) today increased both capacities and speeds in its SanDisk Ultra® II line with the introduction of 32- and 16-gigabyte (GB)1 SDHC™ cards and an 8GB SDHC Plus card. The announcement was made at the photo industry’s PMA 08 International Convention here.Ideal for today’s camcorders and point-and-shoot digital cameras that can record both video and still images, the cards offer faster read and write speeds of 15 megabytes per second2...
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What's new is old again, it seems. Security researchers are warning consumers to be cautious about using items like freebie flash drives that are given out as souvenirs at trade shows and similar events. There are recent reports of malware being loaded onto removable storage devices like USB flash drives, and even digital picture frames.In mid-December, Kaspersky Lab senior virus analyst Aleks Gostev penned a blog post describing his experience with an infectious Compact Flash card for his digital camera. "We've already written more than once about viruses and worms which spread via removable storage media by launching automatically from autorun.inf," he said. "A number of users have also...
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Nifty, nifty, nifty. SanDisk, the inventor of flash storage cards, is out with a PCI Express compatible module for both laptops and desktops, that supplies from 8 to 16 gigabytes of sweet, sweet flash, to serve up frequently used files almost instantly. It lets you basically turn your whirling hard drive into nothing more than dedicated bulk storage for your prOn... um, files. I meant files. They call it the Vaulter Disk.SanDisk Vaulter Disk accelerates performance by pre-controlling the distribution of storage data between itself and a high-capacity hard drive. This parallel activity increases overall user responsiveness over a hard drive-only configuration.“SanDisk Vaulter Disk consistently...
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Seagate was surprisingly late to join the small, but elite club of storage manufacturers shipping one terabyte (1TB) class hard drives. Somewhat expectedly, the first out of the gate was Hitachi, who made it to market several months beforehand with a high-density five-platter 1TB hard disk design. While Hitachi’s performance, thermals, and acoustics have all been tested to be fairly solid overall, many high-end buyers have been waiting for other large manufacturers, namely Western Digital and Seagate, to get into the game to see how these other products compare. Now, all of the major disk manufacturers are shipping terabyte-class products, so we should start to see overall prices fall...
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Today Sandisk filed a lawsuit against 25 other flash memory vendors, aiming to erase some of their profits.The roll call of the companies is a long one, but here goes: ACP-EP Memory, A-Data, Apacer, Behavior Computer, Buffalo, Chipsbank, Corsair Memory, Dane-Elec, Edge, Imation/Memorex, Interactive Media, Kaser, Kingston, LG Electronics, Phison Electronics, PNY, PQI, Silicon Motion, Skymedi, Transcend, TSR, USBest, Verbatim, Welldone Company and Zotek/Zodata. SanDisk says it's just enforcing its patents to be "fair" to the companies that already license its technology for flash storage devices.Quite a few of those names are well-known, such as Apacer, Buffalo, PNY, PQI and Corsair. SanDisk...
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On October 22nd, innovative memory chipmaker SanDisk is rolling out its TakeTV, a big ole flash memory drive that loads television shows or movies from your computer and plays them on your television. It uses a cradle for their drive that you hook up to your television, and allows you to simply scroll through a menu of available files to play them. It's offering content, too, through a video download service they call Fanfare. For David Poltrack, president of CBS Vision, the TV broadcaster's research division, it's a matter of getting the networks' programming in places that consumers will use it. "When we tested the SanDisk product it clearly resonated with consumers," Poltrack says. "There...
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A U.S. Grand Jury has issued subpoenas to Toshiba and their U.S. partner, San Disk, in regards to claims of price-fixing. While these two are both very well known brands here in the U.S., they are only part of the investigation which covers more than 20 companies:“The filing said 23 other companies were also sued for the same reason.NAND flash memory is used in digital cameras and music players such as Apple Inc's iPod.”It does seem a bit far-fetched that a group of 23 businessmen from different corporations would be able to collude long enough to fix prices without shareholders or financial analysts catching on. Add to that the various bitter rivalries in some corners of the tech industry...
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SanDisk is partnering with Yahoo to offer wireless downloads from Yahoo's Music service on their Sansa Connect mp3 player. Streaming radio from Launchcast and Flickr photos too. Neat. The US $249 model comes with 4Gb of memory, a 2.2-inch colour LCD screen, inbuilt Wi-Fi and a MicroSD slot that allows you to expand the storage capacity of the player. The Wi-Fi connection lets you do more than just buy music wirelessly when it range of and connected to a Wi-Fi access point - it also lets you listen to streaming radio stations from Launchcast and go through Flikr photo streams, although at this stage, wireless synchronization to your PC is...
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If you're running Windows Vista, or thinking about it, then you might know what ReadyBoost is. If you don't, it's essentially a way to cache some of the system page file to a USB drive. The result is typically better performance on machines with limited memory. The only problem is that it requires a USB 2.0 port. That means it's external; and therefore subject to being disconnected when whiskers thinks it's a fun toy. It also makes it one more thing to drag along to a LAN party. While some might wonder why fate can be so cruel, along comes InnoDisk with an innovative solution: an internal USB drive. Yes, that's right; it resides inside your...
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While it seems that almost every major player in both the storage and memory markets is working on developing solid state disks (SSDs), Transcend is planning to differentiate their initial products from the competition. How are they going to do that? Most of the competition is initially setting themselves up to replace traditional mechanical drives, but Transcend is going straight for the ExpressCard slot. Don't have a laptop with an ExpressCard slot? Transcend has thought of that too, and is including a USB adapter with their new drives. This way you can use it now, and get a shiny new laptop later on. The only drawback to these drives is their size, which currently tops out at only...
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Super Talent Announces SATA Solid State Disk Drives Flash Based Drives in up to 128GigaByte Capacity in Three Standard Form Factors San Jose, California - March 14, 2007 -- Super Talent Technology, a leading manufacturer of DRAM memory modules and flash products, today announced a full range of Solid State Disk (SSD) drives with an industry standard Serial ATA interface. This new line of SATA drives is offered in industry standard 1.8-inch, 2.5-inch, and 3.5-inch form factors, making these drives 100% compatible with conventional hard disk drives. However, these products are built with only solid state Flash components. Since they contain no moving parts, SSD drives have the advantage of being...
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Flash vendor SanDisk is shipping a 32GB, ATA-interfaced, solid-state drive (SSD) aimed at enterprise notebooks. The 1.8-inch SSD UATA 5000 can radically improve storage performance and reliability, while adding around $600 to retail costs, the company claims. SanDisk describes its SSD as a fifth-generation flash disk design from flash memory pioneer Msystems, which SanDisk acquired last summer. Msystems's earlier "DiskOnChip" products were priced prohibitively for the consumer market, but have proved popular in aerospace, defense, medical, and other reliability-oriented embedded applications, due largely to their ruggedness. Read more here......
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Seagate announces a monster hard drive! "We should expect to see 1TB hard disk drive products within 6 months." In a statement to DailyTech earlier today, the company claimed: Seagate's 1TB hard drive will be our second generation 3.5-inch hard drive to feature capacity-boosting perpendicular recording technology, and it will use fewer heads and discs than similar-capacity products we expect to see from our competitors. It is clear that fewer heads and discs, along with our proven perpendicular technology, can increase drive reliability, and also reduce operating temperatures, power consumption, noise, and weight. Read more here......
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Finally, a government program regarding technology that I can support. HotHardware has reported in prior articles Seagate Announces Encrypted Hard Drives for Notebooks and How To Turn Your Stolen Laptop Into A Snitching Doorstop both concerning the issues that are being served by this memorandum. After story after story of government laptops being stolen and compromised, the U.S. government is making progress in encrypting all information stored on its data devices. On June 23, 2006, a memorandum (PDF) from the Executive Office of the President mandated that all government mobile computers and devices must fully encrypt all data. The document...
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