Items tagged with Storage
Western Digital is one of the world’s largest storage manufacturers with a wide array of products to meet their customer's unique needs. Its My Passport Wireless line of external drives offer more than just convenient storage. With on-board Wi-Fi, battery, and SD card readers, WD bills them as a working photographer’s best friend. That certainly sounds like a common use case for a device like this, but will this latest WD My Passport live up to its promise? WD sent over their latest My Passport Wireless SSD for us to use and review. The SSD version is available in capacities from...
Read more...
The solid state storage market is highly competitive, and it is also one that changes rapidly as the technology continues to evolve and prices fluctuate due to various factors. There are dozens of companies with multiple product lines that vie for dominance in the SSD space, which can make selecting a drive for a system a rather daunting task for the uninitiated. In this piece, we'll endeavor to make the task of buying an SSD a little easier for everyone by shining the spotlight on what we consider to be some of the better SSD deals currently available in a wide range of prices and capacities....
Read more...
Patriot is perhaps one of the lesser-known PC component and accessory manufacturers in comparison to large players like Kingston or Corsair, but the Northern California-based company has actually been around since 1985. About 10 years ago, Patriot launched its Viper Gaming brand, which offers high-performance gaming memory and peripherals. The product we have today, the Patriot EVLVR, is from Patriot's more business-facing product lines and it is an external, portable NVMe SSD which employs the Thunderbolt 3 interface for full PCIe Gen 3 performance capabilities. The Patriot EVLVR Portable...
Read more...
Consumers have never had more choices if they need to purchase storage, whether it's hard drives, flash drives, solid-state drives, or even cloud or network-attached storage. Save for a couple of blips, prices have steadily creeped downward and today you can score a 10TB hard drive for only $300, or a measly $0.03 per gigabyte. For many users, that's plenty of space -- more than enough to store their movies, photos, music, and documents. For others, though, 10TB just won't cut it. For those users, thankfully, it's almost HAMR time... With "heat-assisted magnetic recording", or HAMR, Seagate will...
Read more...
Seagate is flexing its mechanical hard drive line like its 1999, only with much larger capacities for the modern era. Sure, many of us have moved on to solid state drives, at least for our primary storage. But there is still a market for good old fashioned HDDs. Several markets, actually, and Seagate hopes to serve them all with several new 14 terabyte models. The storage maker updated its entire range of HDDs with new 14TB models, including its IronWolf and IronWolf Pro for network attached storage (NAS) appliances, BarraCuda Pro for consumer desktops, SkyHawk for surveillance applications, and...
Read more...
One thing we always seem to think we have plenty of, yet always seems to run out before we expect it, is storage for our mobile devices. With smartphones taking higher resolution photos and video internal storage doesn’t last long. For iPhone users, this means you eventually end up spending more for cloud storage or deleting things so that you can store more apps and pictures. For Android users running out of storage means you can opt for a larger memory card so you that can keep filming and snapping away. For those users, Amazon has a smoking deal on the SanDisk Ultra 256GB microSDXC...
Read more...
Toshiba has released a string of top-notch, affordable NVMe solid state drives over the last couple of years featuring its BiCS flash memory technology, which target a wide array of market segments. We’ve shown you a few recently, like the diminutive, affordable OCZ RC100 and the mainstream OEM targeted, XG5. Today, Toshiba is redoubling its efforts in the OEM segment with yet another new client NVMe drive, the XG6. We first posted news of the XG6 a few weeks back – if you’d like to check out the initial announcement, it is available right here. Like the XG5, this new drive...
Read more...
Samsung has been a leader in the solid state storage market for a number of years. Whether you were looking for affordable SATA-based offerings or high-performance NVMe gumsticks, Samsung usually has an answer. And we’re not just talking about internal drives either; Samsung has also released a number of excellent external storage devices, like the T3 and last year’s T5, for example. What Samsung hasn’t had was an ultra-high speed external solid state device that shed the limitations of legacy interfaces – until today, that is. Samsung’s latest storage product, the...
Read more...
Anyone who has been paying attention will have noticed that solid state drive prices have come down over the few months, and the year as a whole. It is now relatively affordable to buy a 512GB or even 1TB SSD, especially if you catch one on sale. Well, things may be getting even better for consumers. There is an oversupply of NAND flash memory that is expected pushes SSD prices down even further, this year and into 2019. How low are we talking about here? Jim Handy, an analyst with Objective Analysis, said he expects the market for NAND flash memory to correct itself, or even bottom out altogether,...
Read more...
Intel has taken another step forward in its perpetual march towards high-capacity, lower-cost solid state drives. Today’s release of the new Intel SSD 660p series of drives marks the first in the company’s line-up to pack its brand-new 64-layer QLC (quad-level cell) 3D NAND Flash memory, which essentially doubles the capacities available within the same footprint of previous-gen technologies. The Intel SSD 660p series also leverages NVMe technology, the M.2 form factor, and it employs firmware that’s tuned specifically for mainstream, consumer class workloads. These drives...
Read more...
Your next solid state drive (SSD) upgrade might offer more storage for your dollar than any previous SSD purchase. DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, forecasts that the average selling price of NAND flash memory chips will drop 10 percent sequentially in the third and fourth quarters of this year, despite Q3 traditionally being the peak season for consumer electronics. Growth in consumer electronic sales has been weaker than expected. Pile on top of that expanding an expanding supply of 3D NAND flash memory chips and you have the making of a near-perfect storm for lower prices. In theory,...
Read more...
If you're a Dropbox customer paying for the service, you'll be glad to know that a free storage upgrade is coming your way. Dropbox has updated its Business Standard plan from 2TB of data to 3TB for the same $12.50 per user per month charge. Dropbox says that these storage updates will allow users to upload more UHD video files, offload images from their smartphones, and share large files with clients (a la CADs). The Dropbox Professional plan for individuals is also seeing a storage increase, doubling in capacity from 1TB to 2TB for the same $16.58 per month. Dropbox Plus keeps its current...
Read more...
Samsung has announced that it has begun mass production of a new type of Flash storage chip. The company's fifth-gen V-NAND has the fastest data transfer speed in the industry and is the first to use the Toggle DDR 4.0 NAND interface. That new interface improves the speed for transmitting data of the 256Gb V-NAND to over 1.4 Gbps. That is a 40% gain in performance for this new Samsung 90-layer NAND technology, compared to Samsung's 64-layer predecessor. Samsung says that the new V-NAND (Vertically stacked NAND) has energy efficiency comparable to the old 64-layer chip because the...
Read more...
When Intel initially released its Optane Memory line-up, it was one of the most potent and effective storage acceleration products available, right out of the gate. Due to its 3D Xpoint memory technology, which enables consistent, low-latency, high-speed data transfers at low-queue depths, Intel’s Optane Memory is ideally suited for caching smaller chunks of data in consumer systems. Couple Optane Memory’s unique performance characteristics with Intel’s robust caching algorithms and it showcases the effectiveness of Intel’s solution with today’s PCs. Intel has since...
Read more...
