solid-state

Quick housekeeping note: I'll be posting a bit less than usual next week, probably just Tuesday and Thursday. After that, it's back to all Cheapskate, all the time!

Want to breathe some new life into your laptop? Many people swear by solid-state drives, or SSDs, which promise shorter boot times, faster overall operation, and lower power consumption (meaning better battery life).

Alas, SSDs have a much higher price-per-gigabyte than traditional hard drives--but at least they're getting more affordable. In fact, eagle-eye Cheapskate reader Eric spotted one of the best prices I've seen to date: a 120GB OCZ Vertex Plus 2.5-inch internal SSD for $109.99 shipped. … Read more

Acronis, the maker of the arguably most effective True Image backup software solution, announced today the latest version of its True Image Home 2012. Among other features and improvements, the software now offers file synchronization. This is the first time this feature is included in the company's line of disk-imaging products, which are generally designed to store backups in a proprietary "image" format, which requires backup software for the recovery process.

File synchronization, on the other hand, means that the exact copies of the data are kept in real time at different locations. This allows people to … Read more

You were born in a great family, had a fun childhood. Then you grew up, went to school, spent an exhilarating time at college, learned a whole bunch, and fell in love. Then you had a job that you loved, got married to a partner of your dreams, and continued to live a happy, exciting, stimulating, and healthy life.

Now, that's a great success story, but guess what? Then you died. And your story, the true details of it, might last a bit longer and would die, too. In a hundred years or so, nobody would have any real … Read more

Ever since Intel announced Thunderbolt and made it exclusively available to Macs, Windows users have been wondering if they are missing out. The truth is: yes, they are, big-time. I've been working with the first Thunderbolt storage device, the Pegasus R6 from Promise, and find it to be the fastest consumer-grade storage device out there, period. (Stay tuned for my full review, coming up soon.)

On the other hand, since Macs generally don't support USB 3.0, which has been out for a long time and is becoming more and more popular in the PC world, Mac users have also been missing out quite a bit. Many people are wondering which is better, Thunderbolt or USB 3.0. This is a hard question, as Thunderbolt is about more than data storage; it's also about video transport, connectivity, expandability, and synced audio. However, strictly in terms of storage applications, neither is better. Consumers should really have both. The current separation of the two standards is a lose-lose situation for Windows and Mac users alike. … Read more

Everybody should back up his or her data. You already know that, of course, but sometimes it's hard to remember to get around to it. This is when a portable drive with automatic backup software comes in handy. For you Mac users, a drive that works with your system's Time Machine will do the trick.

Here is our list of the top five backup devices for home users. They may not be the best storage options overall, but they'll make backing up easy. On top of that, they are all very good-looking.

Clickfree C6: This is the … Read more

Of all SATA 3-based solid-state drives (SSDs) CNET has reviewed, the Patriot WildFire offers the wildest performance.

On the one hand, it didn't excel in file-transferring tests where we time how long a drive takes to copy files from one place to another. But on the other, it did much better with application performance than its peers. This singles the drive out from the rest and means that when used as the main drive that hosts an operating system and applications, the WildFire increases the overall performance by reducing the time needed for an application to load and finish … Read more

Symform, a once business-oriented cloud storage provider, announced today that it is giving general consumers 100GB of online storage for free. Considering the fact that most other online storage services offer just 2GB or 3GB for free, this seems like a great deal.

However, as there's no such thing as a free lunch, this huge amount of online storage comes with a possibly even larger catch. In order to get the "free" online storage, you must contribute 150GB of your local storage on a device that's always on a broadband-connected home network.

This is because Symform, … Read more

Solid-state drive prices continue to fall, and SanDisk is doing its part with a new 240GB laptop drive for $450. But don't expect to pay that kind of price when getting an SSD directly from Apple or Hewlett-Packard.

Flash memory-based SSDs are the storage of choice in cutting-edge, weight-sensitive designs. They're standard in all the new 2011 MacBook Airs and will populate the new wave of Ultrabooks due later this year. Drives of 256GB capacity from first-tier suppliers such as Micron Technology were more than $500 earlier this year, so a new drive from SanDisk with comparable capacity … 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