Storage - Page 127

There are a few issues that you have to plan for when you are moving from a HDD or SSD to a new and larger SSD. The first thing is exactly how you will get the data you need off your existing drive to the new drive. The other thing is what to do with the old drive once the migration is complete.

Years ago, it wasn't that uncommon for new computers or notebooks running Windows to have a FireWire port but as the years went by Mac computers are the only brand that really continued to support FireWire. If you need FireWire and more eSATA ports a new host card called the NitroAV fusion pro is available that will be perfect for you.

The move to Solid-State for storage is an inevitability, we all know it is coming (in fact really it is here). The issue now revolves around how this will be delivered to the consumer. Will it be in a standard form factor like SATA or SAS? Or sill it show up in a more...interesting format.

Something like the Fusion-io's PCI-e interface. This concept has enabled Fusion-io to provide some very impressive performance numbers. This is of course due to the fact that they are not held up by the SATA or SAS controller but can access the bandwidth of the PCI-e bus directly. The problem is that this method is not inexpensive to make. As such the cost of owning one it also very high (which is a huge understatement).

But Fusion-IO is looking to try to bridge the gap between their ridiculously overprices enterprise class cards and the enthusiast's wallet. These new cards will be labeled the Fusion-io ioXtreme and ioXtreme Pro. On the surface the only differences are cosmetic. Internally they are very different. The Pro Version allows you to setup multiple cards in a RAID setup while the ioXtreme is for single drive setups.

The guys at HotHardware had a chance to test a pair of these out and they say they are going to be quite the impressive pair once they hit the streets. Unfortunately there is no word on pricing just yet. We hope they really can bring the price more in line with what an enthusiast can afford and not beyond the reach of everyone else.

Intel recently launched a new firmware for their 34nm SSD drives. Unfortunately, as of last night, there seems to be a growing number of people that are finding their expensive solid-state drives dead after the installation. The sequence of events seems to follow these lines;

Firmware updated successfully, reboot into windows, new drivers/updated drivers installed, reboot, disk mount failure. This issue has popped on more than a few forums including HardOCP and Intel's community support forum.

As of this writing no one seems to know what the direct cause is. Personally I have a feeling that the issue is due to the way the current firmware writes information to the drive, the new one is more-than-likely changing the write and read tables. This could be nothing more than people updating without blanking the drive to ensure that the tables match the state of the drive (all zeroes). We will try to contact Intel about this and see if this is the case. Of course if this is the case I have to wonder why the update utility would not write zeroes to the drive during the update to prevent this. Perhaps (again if this is what is happening) Intel needs to rewrite the installer to do this during the update to prevent future drive failures.

Snow Leopard is has not been having a very good time. After being hailed as the next best thing since the Pizza it launched with lukewarm press coverage. You see normally when Apple launches something the press simply goes nuts and talks about all of its virtues. This trend has been shifting slightly. This is probably due to normal cycles in the fickle press, but also could be due to growing scrutiny of Apple's policies and business practices.

No matter the reason Snow Leopard has had its share of issues. From being labeled as a Microsoft copy (for 64-bit, multi core support, built in malware protection etc), to finding out it shipped with a seriously flawed version of Flash and that the built in Malware Protection can only detect two viruses. Now we hear there is an even larger issue with Snow Leopard.

The problem relates to the way the Guest Account works (something disabled by default in Windows). You see some users are reporting that if they log in using the Guest account and then to their regular user account they find that all of their data is simply gone. It is like something reset their account. The problem has been all over the Apple Support Boards, but until today Apple had not even acknowledged the problem.

Today, while they are saying there is a problem they are dealing with it in typical Apple fashion. They are saying "We are aware of the issue, which occurs only in extremely rare cases, and we are working on a fix" according to a statement given to CNET on Monday. I am sure this is a great comfort to all of the users that have lost their data.

With another round of IDF now underway, Larrabee is in the forefront of most minds and thankfully it was shown off publicly for the first time today, running on a six cored Gulftown based PC.

Much like Western Digital with its energy-efficient Green series, mainstream Blue series and high-performance/enthusiast oriented Black series desktop HDDs, Seagate now has a three-tier arrangement in place with their latest high-performance XT series of drives shipping to distributors as of today. Seagate also has the existing Barracuda LP series drives for low-power users and of course the standard Barracuda 7200 series for mainstream.

It seems like it was just yesterday that Intel announced there was a data corruption problem with the X25 SSD. Well I guess it is yesterday that it was announced. But it is not the one you are thinking of.

The first generation of SSDs had an issue where the drive would become fragmented and loose performance over time. This could also lead to data corruption in severe cases.

Now the issue is with the latest 34nm X25 SSDs. The problem is connected to a very small number of drives becoming corrupted when a BIOS password is used. Still to ensure that this does not become a major issue Intel has suspended shipments of the new drive and are working on a firmware fix for this problem.

During the launch of the new Runcore Pro IV SSDs here in Hangzhou today, we also got a look at the newly launched Runcore Easy Three Step upgrade process for its full range of SSDs.

Runcore bundled some software on all its new SSDs, which allow for easily upgrading your HDD to an SSD. It allows you to entirely move over all files and the actual file system (MBR) and OS from your old drive to your new SSD. Software is included to support both Windows and Mac systems, depending on which SSD you buy, the appropriate software will be included.

The process is rather simple, as you'll see in the video below. Matt from Runcore shows us just how it is done. Runcore has really gone out of its way to make the upgrade process as simple as possible and will probably end up selling more drives as a result.

The next video from here in China will probably be of the factory tour where we follow the making of an SSD from start to finish!

We are here in Hangzhou, China in the technology and development area (or HEDA as it's known officially) at the moment visiting the Runcore office to get a hands-on look at its range of Pro IV SSD drives that will launch later today and go on sale very soon.

We spent some time exclusively testing the new Runcore Pro IV, specifically the 1.8-inch Micro SATA 128GB. We compared the performance of this new SSD against a standard notebook HDD in two identical Lenovo X301 laptops. We confirmed that no funny business was going on and that both systems were identical in terms of setup, clock speeds and so on.

Take a look at the video below. We have an unboxing, look at the tiny SSD, performance numbers, boot up and shut down time comparisons and more.

We'll have some more content online soon from our trip to China to visit the friendly folks at Runcore here in beautiful Hangzhou.