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While there have been many new 2.5-inch-standard solid-state drives (SSDs) being introduced to the market in the last two years, it's not every day that you run into one that comes in the new low-profile 7mm thickness. The first one was introduced a few months back by Intel, the 520 series, and now we have the second: The RunCore Pro V 2.5" 7mm Ultra SSD.

The purpose of the new 7mm thickness is so that the drive can fit in an ultrabook, or other ultraportable laptop, without changing the standard SATA port configuration. This means that … Read more

Ever wonder why USB 3.0 hasn't really caught on? Most flash drives and external hard drives are still chugging along on USB 2.0, and most of the latest laptops have just one USB 3.0 port. Some have none at all. (I'm looking at you, brand-new Toshiba Satellite C655D-S5511.)

That's a shame, because in real-world tests, USB 3.0 has proven to be around 3.5 times faster than USB 2.0. That means a full-system backup that previously took an hour should get done in less than 20 minutes.

Maybe things will change now … Read more

RunCore introduced a new SSD this week -- aptly named InVincible -- that offers one unique feature: a self-destruct button.

Well, the special hard drive actually includes two buttons; a green clicker for intelligent destruction (software-based wiping), and a red option that literally burns and cracks the storage chips within the drive via a major surge of electricity. … Read more

Toshiba announced today that its Canvio 3.0 and Canvio Basics 3.0 portable hard drives now offer up to 1.5TB of storage space, the second largest capacity on the market for portable external hard drives.

These two drives both support USB 3.0 (and are compatible with USB 2.0). The Canvio 3.0 also comes in a very sleek-looking chassis and now includes software drivers to make Macs support the NTFS file system.

NTFS is the native file system of Windows in which the Canvio drives are preformatted and generally can only be read by Macs. The … Read more

In a recent update to its upgrade kit offerings, Mac-centric upgrade vendor Other World Computing has issued a drive installation kit for Apple's latest Mac Mini, which allows you to install a second hard drive in a system that shipped with only one.

The Mac Mini, being a cheap and low-power system, is fairly popular because of its low profile design that allows it to fit nicely in small areas such as bookshelves. It can serve not only as a desktop system, but also as a server, and even a media center. As a result of this, Apple offers … Read more

In September of last year, slowdowns in the growth of the PC market led to a surplus of OEM RAM supplies and resulted in massive drops in prices for RAM in the following months. This made upgrades to higher-density RAM chips much more feasible for many Mac users, allowing them to do more with their Macs without experiencing slowdowns and other problems that happen when systems run low on memory.

Even though RAM upgrades being cheaper has allowed many to increase the performance of their systems, another major performance bottleneck of modern computers besides the RAM is the hard drive. … Read more

When it comes to Thunderbolt storage devices, generally the more internal drives it has, the faster performance it offers. This is because the Thunderbolt standard offers 10Gbps speed, while the fastest internal drive, be it a regular hard drive or a solid-state drive, is limited by the SATA 3 standard that caps at just 6Gbps.

The more drives means the vendor can aggregate the performance of each drive into a total throughput that's faster than the top speed of each drive. For this reason, Promise's Pegasus R6, a six-bay Thunderbolt drive has always been the fastest. Now, the G-RAID with Thunderbolt drive can challenge the Pegasus.… Read more

If you've been wondering when Thunderbolt is available for Windows, the answer is now.

LaCie, one of the two storage companies that participated in the introduction of the Thunderbolt standard, told me today that it will be showing off two Thunderbolt devices, the Little Big Disk SSD and the 2big Thunderbolt, at NAB Show 2012.

While these two devices are not new, this is going to be the first time they are demoed on both platforms: Mac and Windows. Up to now, Thunderbolt has been available only to Macs, exclusively. LaCie also revealed that the support for Thunderbolt in … Read more

When it comes to ultrabooks, you have to pick between a solid-state drive (SSD) or a hard drive as the main storage drive. The former is generally limited in terms of capacity, expensive but very fast, while the latter offers much more storage space for a much lower cost.

If you're willing to go with a hard drive, WD now offers another option.

The company announced today the availability of the new single-platter WD Scorpio Blue hard drive. The drive still uses the 2.5-inch standard but is just 7mm thick, as opposed to 9.5mm in regular laptop hard drives. … Read more