SSD

Marvell announced today the deployment of its 88SS9187 SATA controller designed for solid-state drives (SSDs).

The company says the new controller is powered by high-performance embedded processor technology and features the latest 6Gbps SATA 3.1 host interface optimized specifically for SSDs. The 88SS9187 also has Marvell's Adaptive Read and Write Scheme and on-chip RAID functionality. This means it can be used with the latest generation of NAND flash memory.

According to Marvell, the new controller will deliver lower costs, high performance, and better power efficiency, making it also a great choice for the ultrabook computer market. Most of all, the new controller might also lead to the further reduction of SSD prices.… Read more

Bus-powered portable drives, those that don't need a separate power adapter to work, are not new and have been in the market for years. But the Elgato Thunderbolt SSD is the first made specifically for Macs and for now can only work with Macs.

For this reason, like many thing Apple-made, it changes everything all over, again.

For one, it's by far the fastest bus-powered portable drive on the market, though not at all the fastest among Thunderbolt storage devices. Secondly, it's super-expensive at $700 for 240GB (or $450 for 120GB).

While souped-up pricing and performance of … Read more

You've had your computer for a few years. Recently things have started to get slow, and you're thinking of getting a new one. I have nothing against a new computer, but what if you could greatly improve your current machine's performance without much hassle?

You actually can with a standard SATA solid-state drive (SSD).

(An SSD looks very much like a traditional 2.5-inch laptop hard drive, but it's much faster. You can find out more about the difference between these two types of storage devices here.)

In this post, I'll walk you through how … Read more

The Plextor M3 is the second solid-state drive (SSD) from Plextor I've reviewed, and it's quite different from the previous M2 drive.

While the two drives look essentially the same, share the support for the SATA 3 (6Gbps) standard and have a 2.5-inch, 9.5mm standard design, the M3 is not really the next straight step from the M2, but rather a totally different step.

This is because the new drive is actually slightly slower than the previous model, which, by the way, is still one of the fastest on the market. To make up for this, … Read more

No matter how big or small your computer is, there is at least one internal drive to host its operating system and programs. This drive is almost always a standard internal drive, which comes in the form of a regular hard drive (HDD) or a solid-state drive (SSD). The former is affordable and offers lots of storage space, while the latter is generally more expensive but superfast. The good news is, 2012 marked the time SSDs became more and more popular, thanks to the reduced costs and the increased number of vendors joining the storage market of this type.

That … Read more

HANOVER, Germany--SuperTalent showed off a forthcoming product at CeBIT, a PCI Express flash storage system that beats out conventional SSDs in performance but that doesn't cost as much as the company's existing PCIe products.

The RAIDDrive UpStream uses a SandForce controller to handle data-transfer speeds of 1GBps. That's roughly twice the speed of SSDs that, like the pokier but cheaper hard drives they typically replace, use the SATA interface.

The product should go on sale in weeks, said product marketing director Peter Carcione in an interview here. "I'm hoping the end of April," he … Read more

HANOVER, Germany--OCZ unveiled a new solid-state drive here, its higher-performance Vertex 4, and said it'll ship an SSD called the Lightfoot using the Thunderbolt interface later this year that'll be even faster.

Many SSD makers use a controller chip from Sandforce, but OCZ acquired a competitor called Indilinx, and its Vertex 4 uses the Indilinx Everest 2 controller. Where Sandforce gets a performance boost by compressing data, the Indilinx technology uses faster uncompressed links, said marketing director Joost van Leeuwen, speaking here at the CeBIT tech show where it unveiled the products.

The Sandforce-based Vertex 3 products can … Read more

There's not much that's extreme about the SanDisk Extreme solid-state drive.

In fact, it's very standard, with a 9.5mm 2.5-inch design like most laptop hard drives. In my testing, the drive boosted the test machine's overall performance a great deal.… Read more

Synology announced today its first eight-bay DiskStation NAS server, the DS1812+.

This is one of the first, if not the first, consumer-friendly NAS server on the market that offers eight native hard drive bays. This means that when populated with all 4TB hard drives, the server can offer up to 32TB of storage space.

Most computers have just about 1TB of storage space, which is enough (and then some) for most users. The DS1812+, by itself, can host 32 times that much, more TBs than you can count with your fingers and toes.… Read more