ssd

OCZ yesterday announced a new lineup of solid-state drives called Octane that offer up to 1TB of storage space. The company says the top-capacity Octane model will cost just around $1,300, which is much cheaper than some 512GB SSDs on the market. Other Octane capacities, including 512GB, 256GB, and 128GB, are priced lower accordingly.

According to OCZ, the new SSDs are based on a next-generation controller called Indilinx Everest that offers better balance between capacity, physical size, and performance compared with previous controllers. The 2.5-inch-design SSDs support both SATA 3.0 (6Gbps) and SATA 2.0 (3Gbps) standards. … Read more

Toshiba announced today the Toshiba MK01GRRB/R series hard drive for the enterprise market. It offers up to 300GB of storage in the 2.5-inch design.

While 300GB doesn't seem like much, this is a high-speed hard drive that offers spinning speeds of 15,000rpm, as opposed to only 7,200rpm in high-end consumer-grade hard drives. In fact the new drive doubles the capacity compared with the previous model, without increasing the amount of platter, and is currently the largest among its peers, according to Toshiba.

The new drive features SAS connection with up to 6Gbps bandwidth. It offers … Read more

The Patriot Memory Pyro solid-state drive (SSD) is the "budget" version of the Patriot Wildfire that was reviewed a few months ago.

While costing some 90 cents per gigabyte less than the Wildfire, the Pyro is still one of the most expensive SATA 6Gbps SSDs on the market, with the 120GB version being priced at around $200 and the 240GB version at around $430.

The drive's data transfer speeds were relatively slow compared with those of other SSDs of the same standard, including the Wildfire.… Read more

Erasing an SSD (solid-state drive) not only sanitizes the drive, but recovers lost performance on systems with inefficient garbage collection. Utilities like CCleaner or DBAN are made for magnetic disk drives and won't work on SSDs. Fortunately, there are two free secure-erase utilities that do work with SSD drives.

The first utility is named Secure Erase (HDDErase.exe), and was developed by the Center for Magnetic Recording Research at the University of California, San Diego. It's free and effective, but requires DOS boot media. The biggest problem with Secure Erase, however, is that development ended in 2008, thus … Read more

Toshiba announced today the updated version of its Canvio portable drive, which now comes with USB 3.0 and cloud backup capability. The original version of the drive was announced more than a year ago and offers only USB 2.0 connectivity.

The Canvio 3.0 drive is available now in three capacities, 500GB, 750GB, and 1TB, which cost $90, $110, and $140, respectively. The drive is preloaded with NTI BackupNow EZ software for Windows, which enables users to back up both to the portable drive and to the cloud. Toshiba says the software will scan a computer automatically for important documents and recommend which files to back up to the cloud and which to back up to the directly connected portable storage device. It's unclear, however, if the online storage is free, and if so how much storage is included with the drive.

Toshiba also announced that its entry-level Canvio Basics storage drive now comes with USB 3.0, too. The Canvio Basics 3.0 is also available now in 500GB, 750GB, and 1TB versions that each cost $10 less than the Canvio 3.0 of the same capacity.… Read more

Even when you get a good deal, a solid-state drive still costs significantly more than a regular hard drive of the same capacity, and a drive's price is, of course, one of the biggest factors that determines its value. For this reason, it's really hard to rate an SSD without knowing how much it costs. However, that's exactly what I had to do with the Samsung 830 series.

While the final product has been available to the press, Samsung is very tight-lipped about the pricing of its new SATA 6Gbps-based SSD and will not reveal it until … Read more

Hewlett-Packard has begun selling an updated ultraportable laptop with a robust configuration for $664, far below Apple's competing model, the MacBook Air.

The redesigned Pavilion dm1z is now available on HP's Web site starting at $399.

But the sweet spot for the 3.5-pound, 11.6-inch laptop is probably the configuration that's just over the $660 mark. For that you get Advanced Micro Devices' newest dual-core E-450 processor (1.65GHz) with a Radeon HD 6320M graphics chip built in, a 128GB solid-state drive, 4GB of memory, Webcam, and 6-cell battery. … Read more

If you think the Promise Pegasus is just a bit too big (and you're right!), LaCie has something for you. The company announced today that its first Thunderbolt device, the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt external drive, is now available for purchase.

This is the second Thunderbolt storage device on the market, besides the Pegasus, and the first that comes in a design that's small enough for you to carry on the go.

The new drive features a pair of 2.5-inch drives, set up in JBOD, RAID 1, or RAID 0 configurations. Measuring just 1.6 inches by … Read more

OWC announced today the Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G solid-state drive (SSD), which it claims to be the first on the market that fits inside the new MacBook Air (version 2011) and offers the latest SATA 3 (6Gbps) standard.

Just in case you don't know, the new MacBook Air is known to support the latest SATA 3 (6Gbps), which offers a top data rate of around 500MBps. However, the laptop's stock SSD supports only the slower SATA 2 (3Gbps) standard. This means, despite how quickly the machine currently boots and performs, the drive could be the bottleneck that … Read more