I often receive storage devices for review, but it’s unusual that two such similar ones arrive at once. After giving each a fair amount of testing and use, I come away unimpressed.
Are Hybrid Hard Drives A Good Alternative To An SSD?
November 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment
How well does the Momentus XT perform in a Mac laptop? Focusing on lower cost and greater benefit without getting taken in by the coolness of SSDs or hybrid drives, let’s weigh the merits.
Toshiba Offers “Blade” SSDs (Like Apple’s MacBook Air)
November 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment
More information about the unconventional SSD used in Apple’s new MacBook Air. As I discussed in my previous coverage of this new flash form factor, it resembles a PCI Express Mini Card but is much smaller. Toshiba has now proved my speculation that the device uses SATA signals rather than the PCI Express lane used by the similar AirPort card. We also know that the lauded performance of the device is due to its chips and controller rather than skipping SATA in favor of PCIe as some had speculated.
Smoking-Fast Laptops: Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid SSD Disk Drive Confirmed!
May 21, 2010 By 2 Comments
There has been much speculation that a new generation of hybrid flash/hard disk drives was right around the corner, and Provantage confirmed it today: The reseller posted a family of “Momentus XT” 2.5″ laptop drives for sale on their web site, shipping in 3-4 weeks. Many other sites began listing the drives as well, and The Register got the scoop, benchmarks, and official comment.
Hybrid SSD/Hard Disk Drives: This Time For Sure!
May 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Hard disk drive makers are adding flash storage to their conventional spinning-platter drives to improve performance and are targeting the performance PC market. Wait a second, haven’t we seen this before? As Rocky eventually said to Bullwinkle, “but that trick never works!”
Lemons Into Lemonade: Seagate Repackages SATA As GoFlex
May 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment
The external hard disk drive market is incredibly hot right now, but it’s also ultra-competitive. The latest trend is dockable multi-function drives that are friendlier to use and offer advanced features like video playback. Most docks rely on USB 2.0, but Seagate just dropped a bomb on the industry with a simple twist: They moved the intelligence outside the case, repackaging the standard internal SATA connector as GoFlex, an external link to a variety of docks and adapters.
Should Home Users Buy Enterprise Hard Disk Drives?
May 4, 2010 By 1 Comment
Are “enterprise” drives worth the extra cost in a RAID enclosure? The reason I ask is I’ve had 2 of 4 Seagate ‘consumer’ (7200.12) drives fail in my (Other World Qx2) enclosure. The two drives that failed were maybe a year old, well short of any ‘MBTF’ expectation. Enterprise drives cost nearly twice that of consumer drives.
WD’s 1 TB Laptop Drive? Not Quite!
July 27, 2009 By 3 Comments
Western Digital announced this morning the world’s first “1 TB mobile hard drive!” But although the news is great for storage-hungry folks looking for a portable external drive, it doesn’t quite mark a sea change in the storage industry since this drive cannot be used in (most) laptops.
Specialized Server/Enterprise Hard Drives
August 7, 2007 By 3 Comments
Continuing my overview of the specialized hard drive market, we move on to the world of enterprise hard disk drives. These are performance monsters, with nearly all falling above the 10,000 RPM line that defines “exotic” in the desktop space. They also have a wide variety of interfaces, including parallel and serial SCSI, Fibre Channel, [...]
