Storage
Nowadays highest-capacity hard drives are typically aimed at cloud service providers (CSPs) and enterprises, but this does not mean that creative professionals or regular users do not need them. To cater to demands of more regular consumers, Western Digital has started shipments of its Red Pro 24 TB HDDs, which are aimed at high-end NAS use for creative professionals with significant storage requirements. Western Digital's Red Pro 24 TB hard drives come approximately 20 months after their 22 TB model hit retail in 2022, offering an incremental improvement to WD's highest-capacity NAS and consumer hard drive offering. The platform uses conventional magnetic recording (CMR), feature a 7200 RPM rotating speed, are equipped with a 512 MB cache, and use OptiNAND technology to improve reliability as...
Backify Closes Free Accounts, Starts to Charge for Storage
Two months ago, we wrote about a new online storage provider called Backify. Backify got our attention because of their magnificent offer: 512GB of "totally free" online storage. I...
42 by Kristian Vättö on 11/16/2011Kingston Releases SSDNow V200 Series
Kingston has released a new SSD lineup named as SSDNow V200. This series comes in 2.5" form factor and is the successor of V100 series, which was released a...
12 by Kristian Vättö on 11/10/2011Corsair Gives Marvell Another Try With Performance Pro SSD
Corsair is no stranger to Marvell based SSDs. Prior to its current flagship Force 3 and Force GT (SF-2281 based) SSDs, Corsair released the Performance 3 Series using Marvell...
10 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/10/2011OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G Review: A Fast MacBook Air SSD Upgrade
I've written previously about the SSD lottery you play when you buy a new MacBook Air. As with many commodity components, Apple sources its SSDs from two sources. For...
40 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/9/2011LaCie Little Big Disk (240GB SSD) Review
A week ago we published our review of the first sub-$1000 Thunderbolt drive enclosure: LaCie's Little Big Disk. Armed with a pair of 2.5" hard drives, the Little Big...
24 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/8/2011Seagate's New Barracuda 3TB (ST3000DM001) Review
Platter density has been the crutch of hard drive makers in recent history. Increasing spindle speeds can reduce random access latency, but at the expense of cost and thermals...
77 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/2/2011The LSI SandForce Acquisition: Anand's Thoughts
I'd almost given up hope that someone would acquire SandForce. After taking so long to fix the infamous BSOD issue and our own interests beginning to shift away to...
22 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/2/2011Seagate Introduces New 1TB-Per-Platter Barracuda, Solid State Hybrid Version Coming
Yesterday Seagate had three members of its Barracuda family of 3.5" hard drives: the Barracuda Green, Barracuda, and Barracuda XT. Today, all three lines are being folded under the...
37 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/1/2011LaCie Little Big Disk (2TB) Review: More Affordable Thunderbolt Storage
Thunderbolt is the absolute fastest consumer interface available for users who want high-speed external storage. We proved this in our Pegasus R6 review where we sustained transfer rates of...
40 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 10/31/2011LSI Announces Agreement to Acquire SandForce
For much of the past year I've been hearing SandForce wanted to be bought. The price? $300M - $400M. A bit too rich for OCZ's blood, but a figure...
27 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 10/26/2011OCZ's Octane SSD: Indilinx Everest, Up to 1TB in a Consumer Drive
In March, OCZ signed a definitive agreement to acquire Indilinx, the SSD controller company that pretty much dominated the value segment in 2009 before Intel got aggressive on pricing...
58 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 10/20/2011SandForce Identifies Firmware Bug Causing BSOD Issue, Fix Available Today
After months of end user complaints, SandForce has finally duplicated, verified and provided a fix for the infamous BSOD/disconnect issue that affected SF-2200 based SSDs. The root cause is...
31 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 10/17/2011The Intel SSD 710 (200GB) Review
When Intel entered the SSD market one of its declared goals was to bring the technology into the mainstream. The goal was so important to Intel that its consumer...
69 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/30/2011OCZ Z-Drive R4 CM88 (1.6TB PCIe SSD) Review
In our last SandForce SSD roundup I talked about how undesirable the consumer SSD market is, at least for those companies who don't produce their own controllers and/or NAND...
58 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/27/2011Early Benchmarks and Teardown of LaCie Little Big Disk
LaCie released its first Thunderbolt-equipped storage solution called Little Big Disk (LBD) last week, and some people have already received their units. A user ender21 over at MacRumors Forums...
8 by Kristian Vättö on 9/26/2011The Samsung SSD 830 Review
Samsung is a dangerous competitor in the SSD space. Not only does it make its own controller, DRAM and NAND, but it also has an incredible track record in...
100 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/24/2011OCZ Releases Synapse SSD for Caching
OCZ has released a new series of SSDs called Synapse Cache today. This announcement is a bit different from normal SSD announcements since OCZ will be bundling Dataplex caching...
37 by Kristian Vättö on 9/21/2011LaCie Brings (more) Affordable Thunderbolt Storage to Macs with Little Big Disk, Available in Retail
At IDF I met with LaCie and got a quick demo of its Little Big Disk Thunderbolt storage solution. The heavy metal chassis is home to two 2.5" drive...
17 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/20/2011OWC Releases 6Gb/s SSD Upgrades for 2011 MacBook Air
OWC has released SSD upgrades suitable for Apple's MacBook Air (our 2011 review). The SSDs are branded as Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G and come in capacities of 120GB...
8 by Kristian Vättö on 9/16/2011LaCie's Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Chassis at IDF
I met with LaCie this morning to talk about its upcoming Little Big Disk Thunderbolt storage solution. Unlike the Promise Pegasus R4/R6, the Little Big Disk only accommodates two...
6 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/15/2011