sata

Transcend's solid-state drives got a radical upgrade Tuesday, as the company announced a new breed of SSDs that offer speeds of up to 260MBps and come in capacities of up to 512GB, which the company claims is the highest in the industry.

According to Transcend, to boost overall performance, the 2.5-inch SATA SSDs feature an upgraded controller chip that supports a maximum sequential transfer speed of 260MBps read and 200 MBps write. The company claims that this will significantly improve the system bootup and application launch speed and at the same time will offer lag-free responsiveness. The new … Read more

This is kind of an obscure deal, but hear me out. Remember last week when I mentioned that 500GB laptop hard drive for $50? When you perform a laptop drive-ectomy, you're left with that original drive, all naked and with nowhere to go.

That's where an enclosure comes into play. It turns a previously internal hard drive into a USB-powered external one. That's what I call getting extra bang for your upgrade buck.

Enclosures tend to run pretty cheap, but here's one that's cheap: Shop4tech has 2.5-inch SATA-to-USB drive enclosure for $5.73 shipped. … Read more

Any laptop or Netbook that's more than a few years old is probably running out of storage space right about now. These days, it's tough to get by with only, say, 80GB or 120GB.

Time for an upgrade! Newegg has a Samsung Spinpoint M7E HM501II 500GB laptop hard drive for $49.99 shipped. That's after applying promo code NBHDDSALE3 at checkout. (As with most Newegg codes, you must be a newsletter subscriber for it to work.)

The drive runs at 5,400rpm, which is probably on par with the drive you're replacing, and sports a SATA … Read more

Seriously, how much cheaper can giant hard drives get? Here's one for the record books: SuperBiiz (no points for spelling, guys) has a 1.5TB Samsung EcoGreen F2 SATA2 internal hard drive for $69.99 shipped.

That's after applying coupon code JULY4TH, which cuts the already impressive $79.99 sale price by another 10 bucks.

Who in the world needs 1.5 terabytes of storage? Anyone who does anything with video, that's who. For example, if you shoot a lot of 720p or 1080p footage with your camcorder, those clips gobble gigabytes like nobody's business.

And … Read more

How low can a terabyte of external storage go? I've seen the drives hit $90, then $80, and even occasionally the $70 mark. But $50? That's new. And awesome.

MacMall has the Fantom GreenDrive GD1000EU 1TB external hard drive for $49.99 (plus $9 or so for shipping). What's the catch? I call it rebate No. 1 and rebate No. 2.

Yep, the drive will cost you $99.99 up front, then end up at $49.99 after a pair of $25 rebate checks roll in (one each from Fantom and MacMall). I know that's a … Read more

Buy.com once again has a Fantom G-Force 1-terabyte external hard drive for $69.99 with free shipping.

What's the catch? It's the same as last time: a $25 mail-in rebate (PDF). I know that's a deal breaker for some people, but I think rebate fulfillment problems are fewer than they've ever been. You can laugh at me all you want, but I think Buy.com is one of the Web's more reliable vendors.

The drive has USB 2.0 and eSATA interfaces and a 32MB external cache. It's Mac and Windows compatible and … Read more

Intel has starting shipping a solid-state drive that can speed Windows 7 and app load times.

Intel says the drive is aimed at "dual-drive/boot drive desktop set-ups" as well as Netbooks. Solid-state drives typically offer better performance--in some cases, dramatically better performance--than hard disk drives. But SSDs cost more per gigabyte than hard drives, a fact, which, to date, has limited SSDs to performance-sensitive applications such as high-end laptops, gaming PCs, and servers.

The Intel X25-V is a relatively low-capacity SSD at 40GB, but claims performance that is four times faster than a 7200RPM hard disk drive. … Read more

You'd be hard-pressed to find standards as ubiquitous as SATA, which is used to plug hard drives into computers. But its success inside the computer chassis turns out to have been a bad predictor of its success outside.

Years ago, SATA allies created a variation of the specification called eSATA that would let people attach hard external hard drives to computers. The big advantage over USB: an eSATA drive reads and writes data just as fast as an internal drive.

Despite its branding disaster of a name--eSATA stands for External Serial AT Attachment, and AT stands for nothing in particular--eSATA achieved some measure of success. I for one am glad it exists as a way to give laptops some measure of storage expandability of desktop machines. But overall, it never built critical mass, and I believe new technologies that match its speed and exceed its breadth will consign it to obscurity among mainstream computer users.

The nearest competitive threat is the new USB 3.0 "SuperSpeed," which offers transfer speeds of 5 gigabits per second compared to the 480 megabits per second of the currently prevailing version of the multipurpose Universal Serial Bus technology.

The new USB version is just now assuming the throne after a dangerously long reign by its predecessor. The first hard drives supporting it are on the market, and soon it will become mandatory in PCs. … Read more

LaCie announced Thursday the Rugged eSATA external hard drive. Though external hard drives with an eSATA connection are not new, this appears to be the first drive that comes with a Power eSATA interface. This means its eSATA cable is also capable of powering the device, making the drive more portable.

The Power eSATA interface, also known as a USB-eSATA combo interface, combines the high transfer speeds of the eSATA standard with the USB standard's capability to draw juice from the computer.

The USB-eSATA combo interface has a slightly different connector than the standard eSATA and, unfortunately, is only … Read more