ssd

It seems I've been obsessed with size lately, so let's move on to capacity immediately. If for some strange reason you want to exactly double the limited storage capacity of the iPad, then the Kingston Wi-Drive would fit the bill perfectly.

The portable storage device is available in 16GB and 32GB capacities, which corresponds exactly to the first and second storage tiers of the iPad. The Wi-Drive is supercompact, about a third the size of the 500GB Seagate Satellite, which was the first wireless storage extender for tablets.

Though much smaller, the Wi-Drive offers one thing that the … Read more

Clickfree's supereasy automatic backup solutions, such as the Clickfree C2N, have one shortcoming: they can't back up the entire computer and restore it to an earlier point of time. This is no longer true with the C6 Easy Imaging, which the company announced today.

This is the next generation of automatic backup solutions that, apart from personal data files, can also back up software and the entire operating system. This is similar to imaging software such as Acronis True Image. This allows the user to restore the entire system to what it was before being backed up, in … Read more

It's been a while since Intel announced Thunderbolt, but now the first storage solution based on the new peripheral standard is finally available for purchase, if you can afford it.

Promise, one of the hardware vendors that participated along with LaCie in the Intel Thunderbolt event with demo products, announced today that it is now shipping the Pegasus line of high-performance RAID storage solutions featuring Thunderbolt technology. LaCie, on the other hand, says it will ship its own Thunderbolt device sometime this summer.

The line includes four- and six-bay external storage enclosures that offer between 4TB and 12TB of … Read more

LaCie, the hardware vendor that has been known to turn storage devices trendy, has just done it again. The company announced today that it has collaborated with Porsche Design Group to introduce two exclusive Porsche-inspired external storage devices: the Porsche Design Mobile (P'9220) and Porsche Design Desktop (P'9230) hard drives.

The company says these two new drives support the fast USB 3.0 standard. While USB 3.0 is definitely fast, it would have been more appropriate if the drives supported Thunderbolt, which has a ceiling speed of 10Gbps, twice that of USB.

To make up for this, … Read more

Solid-state drives (SSDs) have always been sort of extreme. They are, for the most part, extremely fast and, unfortunately, even more extremely expensive. I wouldn't mind having one that's slightly less fast so that it could be more affordable, and the Crucial M4 just about fits that bill.

The drive performed well in our testing, though it was slower than others. Compared with traditional hard drives, however, it's still easily two or three times faster. In terms of pricing, it's the most affordable 2.5-inch SATA 3 SSD we've reviewed.

At around $440 for 256GB (… Read more

Because of the high prices of solid-state drives, most tablets have limited storage. To keep the cost reasonable, manufacturers have to opt for offering low-capacity units.

And the main reason why tablets don't use hard-disk drives (HDDs) is the physical size: HDDs are generally not compact enough for the portability of a tablet computer. That is, unless, that HDD is Seagate Technology's Momentus Thin.

The company announced today that this hard drive, which is the world's first 2.5-inch hard drive with a 7mm profile, is now also the internal storage unit for the first HDD-based handheld tablets in the world, the 8- and 10-inch Archos G9 tablets. The new tablets, unveiled today, are among the first low-cost high-capacity tablets on the market.… Read more

It seems the iPad's limited internal storage and lack of peripheral ports provide ample opportunities for storage vendors.

About a month ago, Seagate Technology introduced the GoFlex Satellite as the first mobile hard drive that can stream content to the iPad. Today, G-Technology, a subsidiary of Hitachi Storage that focuses on external storage solutions, announced a similar product of its own: the G-Connect wireless storage product.

The G-Connect is similar to the GoFlex Satellite in multiple ways. It's another compact 500GB portable hard drive that has a built-in Wireless-N access point that can stream stored digital content to up to five wireless devices (the Satellite can only stream to three devices).

The G-Connect has one major advantage over the Satellite: it also comes with an Ethernet port for connecting to an existing network, and hence is capable of also offering an Internet connection to the connected clients. Clients can surf the Web and check e-mails while streaming content, such as music, at the same time. This makes the device almost an alternative for the iCloud service recently announced by Apple.… Read more

There is no doubt that when compared to a mechanical hard drive, the new solid state drive (SSD) technology is by far superior in terms of speed. Data access and throughput can be well above 4x faster than a contemporary mechanical drive, and using it as your main boot drive widens a major bottleneck, resulting in exceptionally quick boot-ups, application launches, sleep and wake events, and shutdowns. Beyond speed, the drives also have a number of additional perks, including cooler operation than most mechanical drives, power efficiency resulting in longer battery life for laptops, silent operation, and higher tolerance for … Read more

Editor's note: This post was updated on February 20, 2013 to reflect the current state of SSDs on the market.

If your computer still runs on a hard drive, it's time to move to a solid-state drive (SSD). (Check out this How To, if you need help). It will be the single biggest upgrade that will hugely improve the system's performance, even better than getting a new computer that also runs on a hard drive.

But is there any place that SSDs' performance falls short in comparison with hard drives? Now that SSDs' prices have been getting … Read more