The StorageReview.com review database offers in-depth analysis and comparison of the latest storage products. The latest HDD reviews (hard disk drive), SSD reviews (solid state drive), external storage reviews and related accessories are listed below.
May 8th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
Toshiba SATA HDD Enterprise 3.5" Review (MG03ACAx00)
Toshiba's new MG03 SATA enterprise 3.5" hard drives are now being offered as standard or encrypted models in the industry's highest capacity ranging up to 4TB while spinning at 7,200RPM with a SATA 6Gb/s interface. As we noted in our recent review of the MG03 4TB SAS, Toshiba has seen increasing demand for encryption and as such, they will now be offering it across all of their new models. As with the sibling SAS drives, the SATA drives offer a big jump in capacity to 4TB from 2TB as well as up to 18% faster sustained transfer rates and power consumption reduced significantly by up to 15%. Rounding out the enhancements, this new generation of SATA drives now interface over 6Gb/s SATA instead of 3Gb/s.
May 7th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
Seagate 600 SSD Review
The Seagate 600 SSD is a performance-focused 2.5-inch MLC NAND client SSD in z-Height 5mm and 7mm form factors with a capacity up to 480GB that is primarily designed as an upgrade for laptop users who are gamers, enthusiasts or road warriors or simply need the drive for read-intensive applications. Additionally, as an SSD with no moving parts, there is less of a disk failure risk if users accidentally drop their laptop. Primarily though, Seagate developed the 600 SSD with performance focused on reducing wait times; its boot speed and load times are 50% faster than traditional HDDs. As far as endurance goes, the Seagate 600 SSD offers up to 40GB of data written per day for a maximum of 72TB written over its 3-year warranty period.
May 7th, 2013 by Kevin OBrien
Seagate 600 Pro Enterprise SSD Review
The Seagate 600 Pro SSD is a 2.5-inch MLC NAND enterprise-class SSD in a 7mm form factor with a capacity up to 480GB that is designed for read-intensive applications. Due to its size, the 600 Pro easily fits almost any platform, maximizing capacity while minimizing its footprint. Seagate's primary focus during the engineering of this drive though was to build a drive to meet the growing demand within the enterprise for SSDs that offer enterprise-class endurance and adequate performance at a reasonable price-point. Organizations that need these types of drives include centers, cloud system builders, cloud service providers or virtualized enterprises. In these applications, the enterprise requires more endurance than they could get with a client SSD; it wants a drive upon which it can depend to be reliable over time, thus keeping data secure.
May 4th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
PhotoFast i-FlashDrive HD Review
The PhotoFast i-FlashDrive HD is a portable storage device compatible with all Apple iPods, iPads and iPhones using the included 30-pin connector and Lightning to 30-pin adapter that enable users to expand the capacity of their iOS devices by 8GB, 16GB, 32GB or 64GB. Those capacity steps optimize the i-FlashDrive HD for users who require portable storage, those with existing devices who need more capacity but aren't quite ready to shell out for an upgrade, and for those who simply need more capacity than Apple products natively feature. Enhancing its strengths, the i-FlashDrive HD is the only two-way storage device between iOS devices and Mac/PC utilizing dual connectors.
May 1st, 2013 by Josh Shaman
LaCie 5big NAS Pro Review
The 5big NAS Pro is LaCie’s latest NAS featuring the Neil Poulton design users are long familiar with as well as an updated 2.13GHz dual-core Intel 64-bit Atom processor and an impressive 4GB of RAM. LaCie utilizes their own LaCie NAS OS3 in this model, diverging from the Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials in the 5big Office + NAS. The updated OS offers a single user interface for local and cloud storage creating a hybrid cloud via Wuala (the cloud provider with which LaCie merged a few years back). Hardware features include five drive bays, a solid aluminum structure, and plenty of connectivity via USB 3.0 and gigabit Ethernet ports. Designed for small businesses, LaCie's target market is offices with up to 50 concurrent users.
April 30th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
Seagate Enterprise Value HDD (Constellation CS) Review
The Seagate Enterprise Value HDD which is also known as the Constellation CS, is a 3.5", 7,200RPM SATA drive with a maximum capacity of 3TB that is targeted at organizations looking for the cost-effectiveness of consumer HDDs but also the enterprise features they need. The Constellation CS fit those needs by offering inexpensive bulk-storage for cases such as hosting unstructured data in the cloud with the lowest $/GB cost in the market. Adding to the Constellation CS drives' overall value is that at 2.75W/TB, it also offers the lowest power consumption of any new enterprise-class HDD, drawing up to 29% less power than competitive high-capacity enterprise drives by Seagate's numbers.
April 30th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
Toshiba Canvio Connect 750GB Review
The Toshiba Canvio Connect is a lifestyle portable storage device that interfaces over USB 3.0 and has capacity up to 2TB while simultaneously offering significant backup tools and remote access to digital content. The Canvio Connect is Toshiba's latest addition to the Canvio line of drives which are designed for everyday media and file storage applications. It replaces the existing the Canvio USB 3.0 in the series which falls in the middle by offering backups not found with the Basics model, but not the high-end automatic backups found in the company's highest-end portable drive. The Canvio Connect features several enhancements over the previous generation. While the existing model tops off at 1.5TB, the new Connect can hit 2TB. Additionally, Toshiba has now integrated the USB interface onto the circuit board, replacing the bridge connector and thus shortening the Canvio Connect's length by a third.
April 26th, 2013 by Kevin OBrien
Lenovo ThinkServer RD530 Review
The Lenovo ThinkServer RD530, the 1U sibling to the 2U RD630 we previously reviewed, is a mainstream server designed with the specs users need to support database applications as well as virtualized infrastructures. The RD530 offers essentially the same hardware and options as the RD630 in half the space. The ThinkServer RD530 runs on the Intel Xeon E5-2600 processor family and can support up to 320GB of RAM. One major difference is how many drives are supported. The RD530 offers slots for up to four LFF HDDs or eight SFF SATA, SAS or SSDs, while the RD630 could support up to sixteen SFF drives.
April 25th, 2013 by Brian Beeler
WD Blue UltraSlim 500GB Review (WD5000MPCK)
The WD Blue UltraSlim blends affordability with capacity and is WD's latest effort at a mainstream hard drive designed for OEMs. This WD message has long been utilized by the Blue line of hard drives, but this time WD has pushed the boundaries even further, or perhaps you could say contracted those boundaries by releasing the drive in an amazingly thin 5mm body and 2.5" form factor. Just how thin is a 5mm hard drive? About half as thick as a standard 9.5mm form factor and thinner than three SD cards. An engineering feat for sure, UltraSlim 500GB contains just a single platter that spins at 5400 RPM and connects via the diminutive SFF-8784 edge connector and SATA 6Gb/s interface. The drive isn't just thin for thinness sake; OEMs are demanding thinner hard drives for their increasingly skinny portable computing designs and on the enterprise side, embedded solutions have the same requirement. Hardware designs are slimming down and manufacturers either don't want to give up the capacity hard drives offer or don't want or need to take on the expense profile of SSDs.
April 24th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
Toshiba SAS HDD Enterprise 3.5" Review (MG03SCAx00)
Toshiba's new MG03 SAS Enterprise 3.5" hard drives offer a 7,200 RPM spindle speed with top-of-the-line capacities up to 4TB and SAS 6Gb/s interface in either standard or encrypted (SED) models. The encryption feature is part of a push Toshiba is mounting to provide more security options across all new drives. The MG03 SAS Enterprise drives present a host of updates compared to the previous generation. Toshiba expanded capacities up to 4TB from 2TB, and the MG03 SAS drives now offer up to 18% faster sustained transfer rates while shaving power consumption up to 15%. Additionally, the drives offer cache buffers of 64MB, which is a significant bump from the previously offered 16MB buffers. The drives also offer error correction (ECC) for more reliability. All told, the lastest MG03 offering is on more even terms with other leading drives in the high-capacity enterprise SAS space and aims to be a viable option in a market long dominated by other drive vendors.
