Crave

Bus-powered portable drives, those that don't need a separate power adapter to work, are not new and have been in the market for years. But the Elgato Thunderbolt SSD is the first made specifically for Macs and for now can only work with Macs.

For this reason, like many thing Apple-made, it changes everything all over, again.

For one, it's by far the fastest bus-powered portable drive on the market, though not at all the fastest among Thunderbolt storage devices. Secondly, it's super-expensive at $700 for 240GB (or $450 for 120GB).

While souped-up pricing and performance of … Read more

You've had your computer for a few years. Recently things have started to get slow, and you're thinking of getting a new one. I have nothing against a new computer, but what if you could greatly improve your current machine's performance without much hassle?

You actually can with a standard SATA solid-state drive (SSD).

(An SSD looks very much like a traditional 2.5-inch laptop hard drive, but it's much faster. You can find out more about the difference between these two types of storage devices here.)

In this post, I'll walk you through how … Read more

The Plextor M3 is the second solid-state drive (SSD) from Plextor I've reviewed, and it's quite different from the previous M2 drive.

While the two drives look essentially the same, share the support for the SATA 3 (6Gbps) standard and have a 2.5-inch, 9.5mm standard design, the M3 is not really the next straight step from the M2, but rather a totally different step.

This is because the new drive is actually slightly slower than the previous model, which, by the way, is still one of the fastest on the market. To make up for this, … Read more

No matter how big or small your computer is, there is at least one internal drive to host its operating system and programs. This drive is almost always a standard internal drive, which comes in the form of a regular hard drive (HDD) or a solid-state drive (SSD). The former is affordable and offers lots of storage space, while the latter is generally more expensive but superfast. The good news is, 2012 marked the time SSDs became more and more popular, thanks to the reduced costs and the increased number of vendors joining the storage market of this type.

That … Read more

Mobile USB modems are not new, and all of them generally require some software to start the cellular connection. But not the one Clear announced today.

The wireless carrier, known mostly for its unlimited 4G data plans, introduced the Stick Atlas, the first USB cellular modem on the market that doesn't require software at all.

The company says that the moment the device is plugged into a USB port, the computer will gain access to the Internet, much like when the computer is plugged into a network port.… Read more

LaCie has been known to give its tech products a touch of fashion, and the 2big Thunderbolt Series is no exception.

The device looks good and sturdy, resembling the rest of the 2big family, including the already reviewed 2big USB 3.0.

The biggest difference from the previous models is that it has two Thunderbolt ports on the back that take the place of any other connection types, so no USB, FireWire, or eSATA.… Read more

There's not much that's extreme about the SanDisk Extreme solid-state drive.

In fact, it's very standard, with a 9.5mm 2.5-inch design like most laptop hard drives. In my testing, the drive boosted the test machine's overall performance a great deal.… Read more

This is not one of those typical thumbdrives being given out at social events. For one thing, the Lexar JumpDrive Triton may be the first device I've run into in a long, long time that doesn't bear the "Made in China" label. Instead, there's a message on its back that clearly reads "Product of USA." While it's unclear if the drive is actually made entirely in the States, one thing is for sure: it holds a lot more appeal than just patriotic sentiment.… Read more

The top-notch NAS server DS1511+ that won CNET's Editors' Choice award has just probably become top-notch no more. But that's good news.

Synology announced today the brand-new successor, the DS1512+ NAS server, which shares the same five-bay design as the DS1511+ as well as most of the features. On top of that the new server now supports USB 3.0 and has a faster processor to promise the performance of up to 192MBps write and 194MBps read.

Similar to its predecessor, the new DS1512+ can natively host five SATA hard drives to offer up to 20TB of storage … Read more