Performance

It wouldn't be a huge stretch to call the new Intel 520 Series solid-state drive (SSD) SandForce on steroids.

The new drive uses the popular SandForce SSD controller but now with a little tweak: Intel's special 400i firmware.

And that makes a big difference. The new drive offered great performance in my testing, faster than most all other SSDs I've seen that use the same controller.

However, that's not the most special thing about the drive. It's the first I've seen that comes in the new 7mm thickness, meaning that it will fit in … Read more

SanDisk announced today its latest solid-state drive, the SanDisk Extreme.

The company says the new drive offers up to 10 times the speed of a 7,200rpm hard drive and will greatly improve the boot and shutdown time as well as overall performance of a computer.

According to SanDisk, the new SanDisk Extreme SSD delivers up to 83,000 maximum random write input/output operations per second (IOPS) and up to 44,000 random read IOPS. The drive also offers fast sequential read and write performance up to 550MBps and 520MBps, respectively. This means apart from improving a computer's … Read more

We often don't appreciate love till love is lost or broken. The same goes for networking and storage devices.

Do you realize that you're able to read this post this right now because some router and storage device somewhere are both busy at work?

The good news is that every year we have a day to appreciate love. And you may also want to take this opportunity to appreciate the tech tool that's been so underappreciated. Luckily, I am here to help.

Here are the Top 5 networking and storage devices that are not just among the top of their respective categories--including mobile routers, home wireless routers, internal drives, network storage, and external storage devices--but are also collectively sexy, cute, lovely devices that would make a great gift for a special someone. … Read more

The Clear Spot Voyager is tiny, just about the size of a large pebble, but it's in no way a small deal.

The mobile hot-spot router offers almost all you can expect from a mobile router including two very important factors for travelers: Internet speed and battery life. … Read more

Intel announced today its latest consumer-grade solid-state drive, the Intel SSD 520 Series.

The new drive supports the latest SATA 3 (6Gbps) standard, uses Intel's 25-nanometer (nm) NAND memory process technology, and is powered by an LSI SandForce Flash Storage Processor with firmware that Intel co-defined and validated. Intel says the 520 Series will set new industry performance benchmarks for SSDs. … Read more

You counted right, the Amped Wireless R10000G router has four zeros in its name.

Those digits are intended to indicate that the router is able to offer Wi-Fi coverage for an area of 10,000 square feet, about 10 times that of a good-size apartment.

In my testing, it indeed offered really long range.… Read more

The $145 D-Link Amplifi HD Media Router 2000 DIR-827 is the third I've reviewed in D-Link's Amplifi family of wireless routers, but it comes with lot of firsts.

This is the first true dual-band router from D-Link that I'm aware of that comes with internal antennas, making it much more compact than previous true dual-band routers, such as the DIR-855. It's the first on the market to come with a USB 3.0 port, instead of USB 2.0. And finally, it's the first I've seen to come with an SD card slot, in … Read more

Having shown its first Thunderbolt drive at CES 2012 without providing much detail, Western Digital is now sharing more information the second time around.

The major storage vendor is showing off the same drive again, called the My Book Thunderbolt Duo, at Macworld iWord 2012, which is currently taking place in San Francisco.

The new My Book Thunderbolt Duo dual-drive storage system comes in the same shape and design as Western Digital's My Book Studio Edition II but it now has two Thunderbolt ports instead of any other connection options, such as USB or FireWire.… Read more

New year, new resolutions.

If one of your resolutions is to get a better computer so you can be happier with your life, I'd suggest you double down on exercising, or better yet add eating healthy to the list, because chances are your computer is working just fine.

What you need might just be a new internal storage device and your computer will be as good as new, or maybe even better. This is especially true if you have a system (be it a laptop or desktop, running Macs or Windows) that's 3 or 4 years old and uses an SATA hard drive as its main internal storage device. Most existing computers fit this category, by the way.… Read more