solid-state drives

Of all SATA 3-based solid-state drives (SSDs) CNET has reviewed, the Patriot WildFire offers the wildest performance.

On the one hand, it didn't excel in file-transferring tests where we time how long a drive takes to copy files from one place to another. But on the other, it did much better with application performance than its peers. This singles the drive out from the rest and means that when used as the main drive that hosts an operating system and applications, the WildFire increases the overall performance by reducing the time needed for an application to load and finish … Read more

Symform, a once business-oriented cloud storage provider, announced today that it is giving general consumers 100GB of online storage for free. Considering the fact that most other online storage services offer just 2GB or 3GB for free, this seems like a great deal.

However, as there's no such thing as a free lunch, this huge amount of online storage comes with a possibly even larger catch. In order to get the "free" online storage, you must contribute 150GB of your local storage on a device that's always on a broadband-connected home network.

This is because Symform, … Read more

Solid-state drive prices continue to fall, and SanDisk is doing its part with a new 240GB laptop drive for $450. But don't expect to pay that kind of price when getting an SSD directly from Apple or Hewlett-Packard.

Flash memory-based SSDs are the storage of choice in cutting-edge, weight-sensitive designs. They're standard in all the new 2011 MacBook Airs and will populate the new wave of Ultrabooks due later this year. Drives of 256GB capacity from first-tier suppliers such as Micron Technology were more than $500 earlier this year, so a new drive from SanDisk with comparable capacity … Read more

Mac users with a NAS server should probably wait a bit before upgrading to OS X 10.7 Lion, due for release later this month.

According to Synology, maker of the highest-rated NAS servers on the market, its DiskStation servers will not work well with Lion, or at least the support for the Time Machine. This is because with Lion, Apple has changed the way Mac file service works, and it uses the new version of Netatalk for Time Machine. This means most, if not all, NAS servers that currently support Mac 10.6 will not be fully compatible with … Read more

Apple's upcoming refresh of the MacBook Air will get more than just new Intel processors. A Japanese report says the flash drives will get updated storage tech too.

Apple's flash drives--also referred to as solid-state drives or SSDs--in the upcoming MacBook Air will use a technology called "Toggle Mode Double Data Rate NAND Flash" 2.0 (Toggle DDR 2.0) according to Macotakara, a Japanese-language Apple enthusiast Web site.

The standard is supported by Toshiba and Samsung. Both companies currently supply flash drives for the MacBook Air.

Here's how Toshiba describes the technology: "Toggle … 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

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

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