Storage News - Page 111

With the ever-growing popularity of compact notebooks and high-end portable devices, the demand for Solid State Drives (SSD) is greater than ever. A-DATA offers a new SSD aimed at a growing, more casual audience seeking for fast and solid storage device.

A-DATA XPG 2.5" SSD is an innovative gadget available up to a tremendous capacity of 192GB. Having both, SATA II high-speed interface and an extra built-in mini-USB 2.0 port, this SSD combines the advantages of SSD and conventional hard drives, such as mobility and great convenience, in one device.

The new 256GB SSD more than doubles the performance rates of Samsung 64GB and 128GB SSDs to become the SSD with the highest overall performance in the personal computer industry, combining sequential read rates of 220MB/s (megabytes per second) with sequential write rates of 200MB/s. This sharply narrows the performance gap between read and write operations to only 10 percent, compared to a read-write speed difference of between 20 and 70 percent for other SSDs. In addition, erase cycles are a rapid 100GBs per minute, allowing the entire drive to be re-written much faster, when needed.

"While SSD's have always been touted for their performance, Samsung is turning the storage industry upside down now with an SSD that delivers truly disruptive performance," said Jim Elliott, vice president, memory marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. "Getting our exceptionally high performing 256GB SSD in a notebook is analogous to having a 15,000rpm drive, without all of its size, noise, power and heating drawbacks.".

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif.-November 10, 2008-Seagate (NASDAQ:STX) today announced sweeping advances in its global push to help secure notebook computer information from theft or loss. To combat growing threats to mobile information, Seagate, the world leader in storage solutions, is now shipping its groundbreaking, self-encrypting notebook PC hard drives, now with up to 320GB of capacity, to the worldwide distribution channel, with 500GB models coming soon. Additionally, Dell is now shipping a notebook with a 160GB self-encrypting hard drive. McAfee (NYSE:MFE) is set to provide software for the enterprise-wide management of notebooks with Seagate Secure™ hard drives.

Sharkoon is now introducing an alternative that allows users to build a Notebook SSD themselves. The Sharkoon Flexi-Drive S2S is an SSD adaptor with the size and connections of a 2.5 inch SATA hard drive. The necessary flash memory is provided by the up to six SDHC cards that can be installed in the enclosure. Users can select the manufacturer, number, chip type (SLC or MLC) and capacity of the memory cards according to their needs. As the installed memory cards use Raid-0, the performance and capacity of all installed cards should be the same. At this time the maximum available SDHC capacity is 32GB, allowing for a maximum of 192GB to be installed in the Flexi-Drive S2S. Testing with HD-Tune, six 8GB SDHC memory cards with Class 6 speed ratings had a read speed of 140 MB/s and a write speed of 115 MB/s.

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. - November 3, 2008 - Seagate (NASDAQ:STX) today introduced the world's fastest and greenest drive - the Savvio 15K.2 HDD, the new 15K-rpm addition to the Savvio family of 2.5-inch SAS 2.0 enterprise solutions. Savvio 15K.2 HDD delivers the industry's highest hard drive performance and reliability as well as adding a self-encrypting drive option, all while maintaining Seagate's industry leading, record low power consumption. The Savvio 15K.2 hard drive and the previously-announced Savvio 10K.3 hard drive are both part of Seagate's new Unified Storage™ architecture which converges disk drive interfaces, form factors, and security features into a common best-of-breed platform for powerful, yet simple storage solutions. Together, Seagate's Unified Storage architecture and the Savvio hard drive family improve manageability, integration, security and performance benefits for IT departments while ensuring business continuity with no compromise.

As soon as I saw the announcements on Seagate's 1.5TB drive I was intrigued. When I saw the price on Newegg (a mere $189.99) I assumed that this drive would be slow. I'm not even sure why... I guess it just seemed like a brand new 1.5TB drive for a reasonable price would have to have some sort of catch.

So, I decided that XCPUs.com should do a review. But, doing a review on a single hard drive would be pointless, so I had to get some contenders. I had a limited budget, so I had to pick my hard drives carefully. I decided on a Velociraptor 150 (since they an undeniably fast drive) and a Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB drive (since it's an industry standard 1TB drive).