March 28th, 2012 by Kevin OBrien
Plextor PX-M3P SSD Review
When we reviewed the Plextor M3S last year, it earned an Editor's Choice award for excellent read performance, aggressive pricing and class leading support with the included five year warranty. At CES in January, Plextor showed us the upcoming M3P (P stands for Pro), which from a hardware perspective is nearly identical to the M3S, they both use the same Marvell controller and Toshiba Togggle NAND, but the M3P uses a 7mm form factor to be friendly with space contrained devices. The big difference though is firmware; the Plextor M3P is designed to post the fastest Marvell-based SSD speeds yet, with 540MB/s read and 450MB/s write sequential and upwards of 75,000 IOPS read and 69,000 IOPS write.
March 26th, 2012 by Kevin OBrien
2TB Western Digital My Passport Portable Hard Drive Review
Last week WD announced the latest generation of their popular My Passport portable hard drives. The newly redesigned enclosures surround a 2.5" 15mm Western Digital hard drive that uses four platters to offer capacities up to 2TB, making it the highest capacity drive available in this form factor. The My Passport also picks up USB 3.0, making it idea for not just toting files, but for completing high-speed local backups of your PC as well.
March 24th, 2012 by Mike Kowalski
Icy Dock DuoSwap 2.5"/3.5" SATA Hot Swap Drive Caddy Review (MB971SP-B)
Announced earlier this month, the Icy Dock DuoSwap 2.5"/3.5" SATA Hot Swap Drive Caddy gives buyers an easy solution to connect any size of hard drive or SSD into their desktop computer. Offering twin hot-swap bays, the DuoSwap Caddy supports both 3.5-inch hard drives, as well as 2.5-inch hard drives or SSDs that are 9.5mm tall. In this review we go through the features and see how well this caddy holds up in the StorageReview lab.
March 23rd, 2012 by Brian Beeler
Thunderbolt Storage With Any 2.5" Hard Drive or SSD
We just completed a review of the Seagate Thunderbolt adapter which is designed for Seagate's line of GoFlex portable hard drives. The Thunderbolt adapter is appealing, but with current Seagate externals it can only go so far, equaling USB 3.0 and FireWire 800 speeds due to the limitations of the external hard drives offered. What's really interesting though, is the Thunderbolt adapter uses a standard SATA interface for data and power, meaning users could buy the $99 sled and connect pretty much any 2.5" hard drive to SSD to take full advantage of the Thunderbolt port, without paying the massive premium for current pre-packaged external Thunderbolt storage options. That's exactly what we did, pairing the Thunderbolt adapter with the Intel SSD 520 and showing how much performance scales from USB 2.0 to native SATA.
March 22nd, 2012 by Kevin OBrien
Seagate GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapter Review
Seagate's claim to fame when it comes to both their GoFlex desktop hard drive line and the GoFlex portable hard drive line are the adapters that allow the user to swap between interfaces. Seagate has long supported USB, USB 3.0 and FireWire options, but at CES they announced a new Thunderbolt option. This gives Mac users for now, speedy access to external storage that in some cases, like the MacBook Air, wasn't available before. The Seagate GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapter is compatible with the entire GoFlex portable hard drive line including the GoFlex Satellite.
March 21st, 2012 by Kevin OBrien
OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G Review (480GB)
We've reviewed OWC's perpetually growing line of Apple MacBook Air SSDs a few times, most recently the 240GB capacity of their Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G, which bested the SSDs Apple includes with the MacBook Air in every single benchmark we ran and in one case the OWC drubbed the Apple offerings by 10 times. Until recently 240GB was the top end capacity for the Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G, but in January OWC started producing a 480GB capacity, which we look at today.
March 19th, 2012 by Kevin OBrien
Kingston SSDNow KC100 SSD Review
The Kingston SSDNow KC100 may sit in Kingston's business-class family of SSDs, but don't let the standard grey casing fool you, it's a performance drive through and through. Sharing the same high-throughput components as their enthusiast-grade HyperX SSD, the Kingston KC100 gives client users within the enterprise up to 555 MB/s read speeds and 510 MB/s writes thanks to the SATA 6Gb/s interface, SandForce controller and Intel NAND.
March 15th, 2012 by Brian Beeler
Apple TV Review (2012)
The latest Apple TV goes well beyond an Apple side project, to something that even serious home theater enthusiasts could consider. The third generation Apple TV finally boasts 1080p high definition output, along with updates that include Apple's powerful A5 processor and an updated user interface. From the outside, Apple TV users won't notice anything new, but the more powerful processor and full HD output mean the 2012 Apple TV is serious about taking over the media streaming box crown.
March 13th, 2012 by Kevin OBrien
OWC Mercury Elite Pro Qx2 Review
OWC has offered the OWC Mercury Elite Pro Qx2 for a while now, but over time they've managed to update the unit with compelling features and now, with support for up the 16TB of storage via four Hitachi Deskstar 5K4000 hard drives. The four-bay OWC Mercury Elite Pro Qx2 is highlighted by its all metal body, quad interface (eSATA, USB 2.0, FireWire 400/800) and on-board RAID that can be switched with the press of a button.
March 12th, 2012 by Mike Kowalski
Samsung Optical Smart Hub Review
In an era of increasing computing mobility thanks to tablets and smartphones, there's a price premium for storage. Many storage companies are trying to find creative ways around this, creating a new category of wirelessly accessible storage. Samsung's take on this space is around providing modern access to legacy content - old movies, family photos and the like that currently reside on optical media. They also provide access to external storage that's directly attached via USB. The Samsung Optical Smart Hub accomplishes this goal by adding WiFi access to an optical disk drive that can also serve as an access point for Internet access.
