SSD

Having taken a look at some highly desirable items that are highly unlikely to find their way under the tree this year with our 2011 list of things you CAN'T have this Christmas, it's time for a look at some of the gear that might represent more realistic shopping options this festive season. There's definitely some items on the list we wouldn't mind receiving ourselves, while others fall into the category of "for the person who has everything" ... either way, there's sure to be something for every technophile in the household. Read More

Released in mid-2010, Seagate's Momentus XT combined performance approaching that of a solid state drive (SSD) with the storage capacity and cheaper price of a traditional platter-based hard disk drive (HDD) in a laptop-friendly 2.5-inch form factor. It accomplished this by combining a traditional 7200 RPM HDD and a 4 GB SLC NAND solid state memory module in the one unit. Now Seagate has begun shipping the second generation of the Momentus XT that it says is its fastest ever consumer level drive. Read More

If you’re like me, you’re waiting for storage capacities to increase and prices to decrease before ditching the traditional platter-based hard drive and jumping on the SSD (solid-state drive) train to take advantage of lower power consumption and faster boot up and access times. Having already released the world’s first 3.5-inch 1 TB SSD in 2009, OCZ has now removed the capacity hurdle for laptops with the release of the world’s first 2.5-inch SSD that is available in capacities up to 1 TB. Read More

LaCie has finally joined the Thunderbolt club with the release of its Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series. Announced earlier this year, the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt is available in 1 TB (7200RPM) and 2 TB (5400 RPM) HDD configurations at a price of US$399 and $499 respectively. There's also a 240 GB SSD model on the way but pricing is yet to be confirmed. Read More

Soon there could be another reason to replace the spinning disk-based HDD in your desktop or laptop computer with a cutting-edge Solid State Drive (SSD) - Samsung has unveiled its new SSD 830 Series, which utilizes a SATA Revision 3.0 6 Gbps interface, and is encased in a brushed metal housing. It is aimed at the retail market. Read More

It wasn't so long ago that speed junkies were foaming at the mouth at the read/write performance offered by Intel's 510 series of SSD storage solutions. Now Smart has announced that it's managed to squeeze up to 1.6TB of solid state memory into the 2.5-inch form factor Optimus drive and leave the competition standing with a sequential read of up to 1GB/s, and write of 500MB/s. Read More

The end of traditional spinning disks might have come one step closer with the release of Micron's new blazing fast solid-state drive. Although PCIe drives have been on the market for some time, none of them have ever attained the speed of this newest arrival. The RealSSD P320h is capable of 3GBps when reading, and 2GBps when writing data. Read More

Texas Memory Systems has just unveiled a monster enterprise-level PCIe-based solid state storage solution that's blisteringly fast and offers almost a terabyte of available capacity. Nicknamed Gorilla by the company, the RamSan-70 represents the seventh generation of the RamSan product family and uses Toshiba 32nm SLC Flash on a single half-length x8 PCIe card. It's said to offer up to 330,000 IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) read performance and 160,000 write, and up to 2GB per second sustained random throughput. Read More

The fact that Solid State Drives (SSD) offer significantly better performance over hard disk drives is now well established. They're faster, require less power to run and – as they contain no moving parts – offer a more rugged storage solution. At the moment, though, HDD solutions are much cheaper and can store more data on a single device ... but the gaps are closing. Intel has now upped the available storage capacity on its new third generation SSD 320 Series to a spacious 600GB, and has managed to lower the cost by 30 percent. Read More