Archive for: Storage
While there’s only so much you can do to “transform” the lowly hard drive, Seagate has managed to intrigue us with the aging tech by way of their new GoFlex hard drives. Said drives now feature wifi capabilities and a built-in battery which allow the drives to wirelessly transfer media to and from your iPhone or Android device (iOS app now available, Android coming soon) over WiFi and without having to connect to a computer or wall outlet. The included battery is said to be good for ~25 hours which means the asking price of $200 for 500 GB of mobile storage really isn’t all that bad.
If you’re the type that carriers large amounts of files on your travels and constantly frowns upon having to whip out the laptop, this hard drive is your saving grace.
With as much digital junk as we amass these days, it’s a good idea to pick up a spare drive or four. They’re readily available and they can be found super cheap. While you really don’t need any more options in the way of portable hard drives, Gigabyte has two more offerings to add to your selection.
The Pure Classic and Pure Classic 3.0 both come in 320 GB, 500 GB, 640 GB, and 720 GB capacities as well as ship with a handy little carrying bag. The only difference comes by way of I/O technology. The Pure Classic is a USB 2.0 drive will the Pure Classic 3.0 is USB 3.0 compatible.
Hold off on your purchases for now as Gigabyte has yet to determine just how many George Washington’s they’d like to take from your plantation. Stay tuned…
Previous rumors of Apple opening up their own streaming/online locker service just received another healthy boost. The company is reported to have purchased 12 petabytes (12,000 terabyte…which equals 12,000,000 gigabytes) of storage from Isilon Systems, a Seattle, Washington-based manufacturer of storage products. iTunes could simply be requiring more servers for daily operations, but with previous online streaming services such as LaLa being gobbled up by Apple as well as plenty of talk concerning locker-type services, the truth seems pretty obvious to us. Meanwhile, we’ll have to keep speculating as Apple is infamous for running a tight ship. Nonetheless, that’s a lot of storage. Something interesting has to be going on, no?
Hardware giant, Western Digital, is about to get a bit more muscle in the fight against competing hard drive manufacturer, Seagate. Today, March 7th, 2011, WD announced that they were purchasing Hitachi Global Storage Technologies for ~$4.3 billion USD. In total, $3.5 billion in cash as well as $750 million worth of shares will trade hands. According to Western Digital CEO, John Coyne, scale is the sole source behind the purchase, citing the need for more size and R&D spending to combat rival Seagate. The CEO also hopes to offer a greater selection of products for consumers under the WD brand, further increasing the company’s own value.
- February 21, 2011 5:20 pm
As February rolls into March, the PC enthusiast sector is primed and ready for a slew of new hardware, with the most exciting being a slew of next gen SSDs from leading manufacturers. While OCZ’s Vertex 3 Pro may be the speed demon according to early previews, Intel in particular has something very interesting lurking within their new 510 series as well.
If you know anything about Intel’s current line of SSDs, you know that compared to other higher end SSDs, performance isn’t exactly mind blowing — the average read speeds of ~170MB/s and writes at just south of ~100MB/s don’t exactly “scream”. But Intel’s next gen 510 series of high-end/enthusiast SSDs look to change that, boasting speeds of 430/315 MB/s read/write respectively. That’s quite a bit faster than the current C300 series of SSDs by Crucial (fastest SATA III SSD available at the moment) which tip the scales at 355/145 MB/s.
But before you go lunging for the wallet, take a gander at prices first:
Not exactly cheap, though pretty close to current gen pricing. Looks like the fastest 120GB SSD you can by will still sit squarely at ~$300. For those looking for a price break, there’s always next year. According to VR-Zone’s sources, we’re looking at a March 1st release date. Will you be partaking?
As we impatiently wait for new SATA III 6.0 Gbps SSDs to hit the market, Plextor drops a gem on our laps. The MS2 line of solid state drives have a little something for everyone and come in 64GB, 128 GB, and 256GB capacities. Speeds for the 64GB drive comes in at 370MB/110MB per second read/write while the 128GB drive tops out at 420MB/210MB per second read/write. Finally, the top end 240GB drive rockets through the 1′s and 0′s at 480MB/s read and 330MB/s write. Orchestrating the entire show is made possible by the Marvell’s 88SS9174 controller (same as Crucial C300) and is supposedly the world’s most advanced — Plextor’s words exactly. Trim and wear leveling are included out of the box.
Shipping date and release price are not available at the time of writing.
Update
Plextor SATA III SSDs are available now for $180/$330/$700 in 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities respectively.
The aging SD-card spec gets pushed higher and higher with each passing year. A couple of years ago, the big thing was SDXC and it’s promised 2TB capacities. But in 2011, we’re on to bigger and better things. Built on top of current SDHC and SDXC hardware, the new UHS-II spec aims to push transfer rates higher with additional rows of pins on the cards themselves. Speaking of transfer rates, we’re hearing a stout 312MB/s is the goal. Even if we see half of that, it’s still a lot faster than what’s currently possible.
In other flash memory news, SanDisk has started offering a 128GB Compact Flash memory card. This power Core controller and a UDMA-7-equipped slab of plastic features 100MB/s transfer rates as well as a heart-stopping $1,499 price tag. Then again, the type of crowd who needs such luxuries shouldn’t have too hard of a time finding the spare change required.
The SSD market is quickly heating up here at CES 2011. First it was Micron with their 415/260 read/write Real SSD C400. Corsair quickly followed with their slightly faster 480/260 Performance 3 Series. And now, OCZ is offering their own next generation Vertex Pro 3 SSD which is faster still. Corsair boasts 550 MB/s reads and 525 MB/s writes thanks to its SandForce SF-2582 SATA III/6Gbps compliant controller. PC Hardware review site AnandTech ran their own tests on the Vertex Pro 3 and garned read/write results of 492/518 MB/s respectively.
The greatest thing with the new Vertex 3 Pro of course is that the speed mentioned above is from a single, non-raided drive. On top of that, the drives could run even faster with a few tweaks to the controller itself.
There’s no mention of pricing quite yet. But we expect to clear such things up later today once we hit the show floor. Check back soon.
Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a lot of attention paid to WiFi-enabled memory cards from the likes of Eye-Fi. At this year’s CES, the company is taking the wraps off of their newest Eye-Fi X2 card upgrade which brings new functionality to new and old cards alike. With the new X2 upgrade, Eye-Fi users can now extend wireless sharing and uploading to a nearby smartphone or portable device. Combined with other Eye-Fi features such as wireless backup and media sharing and you’ve got yourself another reason to buy more memory cards. Hey, you can never have too much, right?
