Storage

The race for faster data access has a casualty. AnandTech got wind of a report from X-bit Labs that Seagate will discontinue its 2.5-inch laptop-size 7,200-rpm hard drives by the end of this year. The move comes as prices for solid state drives continue to fall while offering more storage space. Seagate currently has three 7,200-rpm drives on the market, the Momentus 7200.4, 7200.2 and Momentus Thin 7200, and one hybrid drive, the Momentus XT. This drive combines a 7,200-rpm drive with 8GB of SLC NAND for caching.

This news does make us a bit sad, because we’ve always enjoyed the combination of disk size, speed and price that 7,200-rpm drives offered compared with their slower 5,400-rpm cousins. Granted, SSDs will smoke almost any 7,200-rpm drive in a data access race, but 7,200-rpm drives have a much more reasonable price per gigabyte.   Read the rest of this entry »

Wi-Fi-enabled storage devices aren’t anything new, but HP’s just-announced at CES 2013 Pocket Playlist introduces an intriguing twist to the now-familiar formula. At a basic level, the Pocket Playlist packs enough portable storage to hold 16 full-length movies, 7,600 songs or 10,000 photos. Cool, but ho-hum.

The secret sauce lies in the Pocket Playlist’s ability to stream said content to up to five simultaneous device via a direct Wi-Fi connection — no Internet service required — and the inclusion of a one-month subscription to the PlayLater app, which brings the world of online video to your offline Pocket Playlist.

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AcerCloud, Acer’s personal cloud storage service, is making its way to the top three mobile operating systems this year. The service, which allows users to save files of all types on their home PC and access them via a Web connection, is expanding its cross-platform support to iOS, meaning users will be able to share files across their Android, iOS and Windows devices.

For those unfamiliar with the service, AcerCloud allows you to set a PC as a primary storage device, which can then be accessed by other Web-connected, AcerCloud-enabled devices. Previously, users were only able to access their files on their PCs and Android devices. Read the rest of this entry »

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Do you have a need for computing speed, but find yourself grounded with a pokey mechanical hard drive ? If so, Adata’s new entry-level SP600 SSD may just be the wallet-friendly flash storage you’ve been waiting for. At $99.99, the Adata SP600 sports one of the lowest non-sale price tags we’ve seen on a 128GB SSD.

Of course, hitting that low of a base price entails some sacrifice; the SP600′s 360MB/s read and 130MB/s write times won’t come close to challenging the top-notch Samsung 830 Series or OCZ Vertex 4 SSDs of the world, but it provides a big boost in boot and file access times when compared to traditional hard drives. The Adata SP600 packs a SATA 3.0 6Gbps interface with random read/write IOPS of 40k/30k.

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Thin is in, and not just when it comes to smartphones. This morning, ADATA announced the DashDrive Elite HE720, a slim and trim USB 3.0 external hard drive that ADATA says is the thinnest of its kind at just over a third of an inch thick.

The brushed stainless steel exterior keeps things simple, sporting a blue LED and an ADATA logo but little else. The metal is covered by a thin protective layer rated at 9H hardness to prevent scratching over the long haul. (Maybe Apple should take note?)

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Modern day hard drive shoppers find themselves with a not-so-easy choice: should you go for the blazing fast boot and response times of an SSD, or the much larger storage capacity (and much lower cost) of a traditional mechanical hard drive? Toshiba’s new MQ01ABDH Hybrid Drive mixes the best of both worlds in a single drive bay.

The 2.5-inch MQ01ABDH Hybrid Drive is a mechanical hard drive with 8GB of baked-in NAND flash to speed up the operation of your most frequently used programs, which are automatically identified by Toshiba’s self-learning cache software. SATA 3.0 compatibility ensures that transfer speeds won’t bottle neck the NAND-enhanced speeds.

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Yesterday at its I/O developer conference, Google  unveiled a number of new products, including its first-ever Nexus branded tablet, but it kept a few announcements in reserve for day two. On Thursday morning, the company showed off a number of new tools and services, including iOS versions of its popular Chrome browser, offline editing capability for Google Docs and Google Compute Engine, a cloud-based super computer system for developers.

Google SVP Vic Gondotra took the stage at around 10:06 a.m., wearing a pair of light blue Project Glass goggles. He immediately thanked the crowd for a great first day and an even better first night party, where attendees enabled the new Google+ party mode and uploaded over 13,000 images of the event.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Few things can breathe new life into a laptop faster than swapping out a hard disk drive for a solid state drive, but ADATA’s hedging its bets with a pair of new mSATA-compatible notebook SSDs announced today. While SSDs are fast, HDDs traditionally offer larger storage capacities, and some users may not want to exchange space for speed.

One possible solution: using an SSD as a caching drive that handles the most commonly used files as a supplement to an HDD. Everyday tasks get an SSD-powered boost in speed while rarely used files get stored in a spacious HDD repository. Wah-lah! Problem solved.

ADATA’s new XPG SX300 and Premier Pro SP300 SSDs feature Intel’s Smart Response Technology to automatically manage which files become cached on the SSD and which files get stashed on the hard drive.

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Today, Seagate launched a new series of external hard drives that continue the proud GoFlex tradition, but with a few new features and a totally new name: the Seagate Backup Plus line.

The biggest twist is social media integration; Seagate is calling the Backup Plus line “the world’s first external hard drives to provide backup for content on social networks.” The newly refined Seagate Dashboard interface can save pictures from Flickr or Facebook account with a single click, while a separate “Share” button helps you easily upload photos and videos from your Backup Plus drive to either of those networks, as well as YouTube.

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If you haven’t yet replaced your notebook’s old-fashioned mechanical hard drive with a speedy solid state drive, you’re in luck. Even as performance continues to improve, the cost of a 240 to 256GB drive has dropped into the affordable sub-$350 range. In fact, some models now cost as little as $239. There has never been a better time to dramatically improve your notebook’s performance by upgrading to SSD.

To see which drive offers you the most performance for your money, we rounded up five 2.5-inch SSDs that support the high-speed SATA III (6 Gb/s) interface and tested them on a quad-core HP Pavilion dv7 notebook test-bed. The control was a 500GB 7,200-rpm Hitachi hard drive. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s the Best SSD? 5 Drives Tested

• The Drives
• Synthetic Tests
• Boot Times, File Copy, and Zip Tests
• Application Opens, Multitasking, and Verdict

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