ssd

Last October, Apple's 11-inch MacBook Air debuted. The tiny, slim ultraportable was the smallest laptop Apple had ever made. Its combination of size and power earned it a four-star review, with caveats: it had a last-generation Core 2 Duo processor, lacked a backlit keyboard, and omitted an SD card slot. We're glad to find the newly released, back-to-school-timed 2011 MacBook Air update fixes two of our three complaints, while keeping a $999 starting price.

Both 11- and 13-inch MacBook Airs have been updated with new, faster second-gen Core i5 processors. The new Air also, finally, has a backlit … Read more

The latest MacBook Air laptops are here, and as was widely expected, they include not only Intel's current second-generation Core i-series processors, but also the same Thunderbolt port found on the latest MacBook Pro and iMac systems.

Even better, both the new 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air laptops have backlit keyboards, the No. 2 most-requested new feature in a recent CNET poll.

Seagate announced today that it's now shipping the Pulsar XT.2 solid-state drive (SSD). This is one of two enterprise SSDs that were unveiled back in March. The second drive is the Pulsar.2 that will also be available for purchase by the end of this month.

The Pulsar XT.2 SSD is the company's flagship solid-state solution for enterprise. Seagate says the drive combines single-level cell flash with a native 6GB/s serial-attached SCSI (SAS) interface and is the fastest internal storage drive in Seagate's portfolio.

The drive comes in the traditional 2.5-inch design and … Read more

Mac users with a NAS server should probably wait a bit before upgrading to OS X 10.7 Lion, due for release later this month.

According to Synology, maker of the highest-rated NAS servers on the market, its DiskStation servers will not work well with Lion, or at least the support for the Time Machine. This is because with Lion, Apple has changed the way Mac file service works, and it uses the new version of Netatalk for Time Machine. This means most, if not all, NAS servers that currently support Mac 10.6 will not be fully compatible with … Read more

It seems I've been obsessed with size lately, so let's move on to capacity immediately. If for some strange reason you want to exactly double the limited storage capacity of the iPad, then the Kingston Wi-Drive would fit the bill perfectly.

The portable storage device is available in 16GB and 32GB capacities, which corresponds exactly to the first and second storage tiers of the iPad. The Wi-Drive is supercompact, about a third the size of the 500GB Seagate Satellite, which was the first wireless storage extender for tablets.

Though much smaller, the Wi-Drive offers one thing that the … Read more

Clickfree's supereasy automatic backup solutions, such as the Clickfree C2N, have one shortcoming: they can't back up the entire computer and restore it to an earlier point of time. This is no longer true with the C6 Easy Imaging, which the company announced today.

This is the next generation of automatic backup solutions that, apart from personal data files, can also back up software and the entire operating system. This is similar to imaging software such as Acronis True Image. This allows the user to restore the entire system to what it was before being backed up, in … Read more

It's been a while since Intel announced Thunderbolt, but now the first storage solution based on the new peripheral standard is finally available for purchase, if you can afford it.

Promise, one of the hardware vendors that participated along with LaCie in the Intel Thunderbolt event with demo products, announced today that it is now shipping the Pegasus line of high-performance RAID storage solutions featuring Thunderbolt technology. LaCie, on the other hand, says it will ship its own Thunderbolt device sometime this summer.

The line includes four- and six-bay external storage enclosures that offer between 4TB and 12TB of … Read more

LaCie, the hardware vendor that has been known to turn storage devices trendy, has just done it again. The company announced today that it has collaborated with Porsche Design Group to introduce two exclusive Porsche-inspired external storage devices: the Porsche Design Mobile (P'9220) and Porsche Design Desktop (P'9230) hard drives.

The company says these two new drives support the fast USB 3.0 standard. While USB 3.0 is definitely fast, it would have been more appropriate if the drives supported Thunderbolt, which has a ceiling speed of 10Gbps, twice that of USB.

To make up for this, … Read more

Solid-state drives (SSDs) have always been sort of extreme. They are, for the most part, extremely fast and, unfortunately, even more extremely expensive. I wouldn't mind having one that's slightly less fast so that it could be more affordable, and the Crucial M4 just about fits that bill.

The drive performed well in our testing, though it was slower than others. Compared with traditional hard drives, however, it's still easily two or three times faster. In terms of pricing, it's the most affordable 2.5-inch SATA 3 SSD we've reviewed.

At around $440 for 256GB (… Read more