ssd

We solid-state drive lovers (it's quite easy to fall in love, by the way, if you have a computer that's equipped with one) should throw a party and hire Jimmy McMillan to represent us. Because, you guessed it, the price of this type of storage device for computers is still just too damn high! So how high is high?

Though priced significantly lower than it was a few years ago, the SSD is still possibly the most expensive component inside the handful of high-end laptops on the market. Unless there's a rare deal or big promotion, a 120GB SSD generally goes for around $200 to $250 these days, depending on the connection type (SATA 2 or SATA 3) and speed.

(It's worth noting that, for most computers, you'd need one that's 120GB or larger. This is because a 64GB SSD, though will get the job done, can hold just the OS, essential software applications, and not much else.)

The price gets progressively higher as capacities get larger. A 240GB--which is the "sweet spot" that enjoys the balance of relatively large storage space while remaining attainable for consumers--now goes for between $420 and $550. Starting at 512GB, SSDs can cost thousands of dollars, too expensive for most of us to afford or justify.… Read more

Mac upgrade vendor Other World Computing is the manufacturer of the popular Mercury line of SSD upgrades that many Mac users have installed on their systems. Early revisions of the drives have had firmware issues that resulted in problems with some machines being put into sleep mode. In late January, OWC tweaked the firmware to address this problem; however, until now the firmware updaters have been Windows-based applications.

As a result, if you have an early revision of these SSD drives and have been experiencing sleep problems, without Boot Camp or without removing the drive from your system and installing … Read more

For those who favor hybrid drives over solid-state drives due to the cost, though the Seagate Momentus XT has thus far been the sole representative, there's now another option. OCZ announced today its first hybrid drive, the RevoDrive Hybrid.

The new drive is very different from the Momentus XT, as it doesn't follow the traditional design of an SATA drive, but rather that of a PCI Express (PCIe) add-on card, normally found in a video or sound product. This means that while the drive won't fit in most places where regular SATA hard drives would be used, … Read more

I reviewed the Crucial m4 solid-state drive a while ago and thought its performance could use some improvement. Crucial announced today that it has just released a firmware update to do just that.

The new version upgrades the drive's firmware from revision 0002 (used for the review) to revision 0009, which is slated to significantly improve the drive's throughput and overall performance. Crucial says that the new firmware will make the drive read and write faster. It will also help the computer boot and load applications even faster when used as the main drive that hosts the operating … Read more

Quick housekeeping note: I'll be posting a bit less than usual next week, probably just Tuesday and Thursday. After that, it's back to all Cheapskate, all the time!

Want to breathe some new life into your laptop? Many people swear by solid-state drives, or SSDs, which promise shorter boot times, faster overall operation, and lower power consumption (meaning better battery life).

Alas, SSDs have a much higher price-per-gigabyte than traditional hard drives--but at least they're getting more affordable. In fact, eagle-eye Cheapskate reader Eric spotted one of the best prices I've seen to date: a 120GB OCZ Vertex Plus 2.5-inch internal SSD for $109.99 shipped. … Read more

Acronis, the maker of the arguably most effective True Image backup software solution, announced today the latest version of its True Image Home 2012. Among other features and improvements, the software now offers file synchronization. This is the first time this feature is included in the company's line of disk-imaging products, which are generally designed to store backups in a proprietary "image" format, which requires backup software for the recovery process.

File synchronization, on the other hand, means that the exact copies of the data are kept in real time at different locations. This allows people to … Read more

A little while ago I made a case that you should keep your hard drive when upgrading to a solid-state drive (SSD). That case is even more clear with the SanDisk Ultra.

This is the first SATA 2 (3Gbps)-based SSD I've reviewed since the Samsung 470, and it's also the first that trailed behind hard drives in terms of data transfer speed. In our testing, the Ultra was actually the slowest among all internal storage devices we've seen when it comes to copying files.

This doesn't mean the drive is slow in other operations. According to SanDisk the Ultra is optimized for random access, which helps boost the performance of applications, especially during launch. And indeed the drive helped improve the overall performance of a computer a great deal in our trials. Games and large applications took much less time to fully load when compared with a traditional hard drive. The drive also cut down the boot and shutdown time significantly. … Read more

Samsung will ship the next generation of its 2.5-inch SSD, the 830 series, in October, the company announced today. With up to 512GB of storage and support for the latest SATA 3 interface, the new drive promises to double the speed of its predecessor, the Samsung 470.

It seems this is Samsung's answer to a slew of SATA 3-based SSDs recently released by other vendors, such as the OCZ Vertex 3, the Crucial M4, or the Plextor PX-256M2S.… Read more

What's an Ultrabook? According to Intel, it's a superthin MacBook Air-like laptop with great battery life and a solid-state drive, which is less than .8 inch thick. Most people couldn't tell you that, though. It's not surprising then, perhaps, that Intel Capital has created a $300 million Ultrabook Fund to drive continuing growth in the category. It is, however, significant news.

According to the press release sent today, Intel's Ultrabook Fund will "invest in companies building hardware and software technologies focused on enhancing how people interact with Ultrabooks such as through sensors and touch, … Read more