OCZ updated the firmware on their Indilinx-powered Octane SSD to v1.13 last week, touting significant increases in random 4K write performance. On the lower capacity models the gains are quoted to jump over 100%, with advertised speeds increasing from 7,700 IOPS to 18,000 IOPs. Percentage gains taper off as capacity climbs, with the 512GB model

At the beginning of this month Western Digital announced the My Book Live Duo, a two bay version of their popular My Book Live. When we reviewed the original My Book Live, we raved about its simple setup, which includes bypassing the need to alter any router settings. For the home user, and even SMB,

Drobo claims their B800i SAN is the easiest to use iSCSI array on the market. Getting the B800i up and running is as simple as connecting the appropriate data and power cables, sliding in your array of drives, and firing up the setup application on your host system. Total time spent finding a place to

While generally not considered part of the storage ecosystem, networking gear plays a key role in transporting data from device to device. In this case we’re taking a look at Netgear’s latest high-performance router offering, the N900 (WNDR4500). The N900 offers all the wired and wireless standards, including 802.11 b/g/n on the 2.4 GHz spectrum

When we completed our review of the Samsung SSD 830 in September, we praised the SSD for being built entirely in-house, which includes key components like the NAND, processor, cache RAM and firmware. Being a home grown creation generally means to better host system compatibility and better/faster support when issues arise. But SSDs need to

Lenovo has made versions of their secure external hard drives for a while, we reviewed their eSATA version about a year ago. This time we’re looking at the USB 3.0 enabled hard drive, available in capacities of 500GB and 750GB. The new USB 3.0 drives are highlighted by the same security – a ten digital

The Corsair Force Series 3 is one of three current generation SSDs offered by Corsair. It’s nearly identical to their Force Series GT, both leverage a SATA 6Gb/s interface, SandForce SF-2281 processors and 25nm MLC NAND. The key difference is the Series 3 uses Asynchronous NAND where the GT uses Synchronous NAND. The difference gives

The Pyro SE is the latest SSD from Patriot and is a new and improved version of the Pyro, both of which are powered by SandForce’s SF-2281 processor. The main difference between the two is that instead of asynchronous NAND, the Pyro SE is equipped with 25nm synchronous MLC NAND, which can deliver up to

We recently reviewed the OCZ Octane SSD in a 512GB capacity, one of the four capacity points offered by OCZ in the Octane family. For many SSD buyers though the 128GB capacity is the sweet spot, with the average consumer SSD capacity hovering near 150GB, 128GB SSDs offer a nice blend of capacity, performance and