There are times when a standard plastic shell is plenty good enough to protect a portable hard drive; taking the subway to work, moving from your office to the conference room…that sort of thing. There are other times when your data needs a little more protection – that’s where the Western Digital Nomad rugged external

When considering the purchase of the latest smartphone, tablet or other portable gadget, the onboard storage has become the most obvious differentiating factor between various models. The iPad 2 for instance comes with 16GB on storage in the base model. For $100 more you can have 32GB and another $100 gets you up to the

Just last week we broke the news that OWC had migrated to Toshiba toggle NAND in their high-end Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD family. Not just that, but the 240GB and 480GB capacities took home a processor upgrade too, moving from a SandForce SF-2281 to an SF-2282. We’ve spent the last week working over the

Wait, Western Digital already has a 1TB Scorpio Blue notebook hard drive – right? Yes and no; this new WD10JPVT model announced two weeks ago is different beast. Unlike the old drive, it has a standard 9.5mm height vs. 12.5mm. The standard drive height opens up entirely new markets for the 2.5" 1TB drive. Where

OWC announced the Electra SSD in June as a mainstream companion to their enthusiast-class SSD Mercury Extreme Pro 6G. The Electra features the SandForce SF-2281 processor and Intel/Micron 25nm asynchronous NAND which combine with a SATA 6Gb/s interface to deliver sequential reads up to 556MB/s and writes up to 523MB/s.

The 1TB Samsung Spinpoint M8 offers a mainstream 9.5mm drive height with two 500GB platters, bringing high capacity notebook storage to the masses. Previously if you wanted a 1TB internal hard drive, the only option was to buy a bulky notebook that supported the larger 12.5mm drive sizes. With the Spinpoint M8, just about any

There were few surprises when Apple updated the MacBook Air line yesterday, adding a faster Intel Core i5 processor, more RAM, backlit keyboard and a few other goodies like a Thunderbolt port and Mac OS X Lion. We’re most interested in the MacBook Air’s SSD though; we quickly tore down the 128GB MacBook Air to

Patriot announced their Wildfire line of SSDs in March, in line with the SandForce SF-2281 release. At the time of the announcement Patriot planned on disabling RAISE on their drives, which essentially gives the user a more capacity, in exchange for a performance hit of around 10%. They’ve changed course here instead opting for enabling

The Corsair Force Series GT is an enthusiast-class SSD based on the SandForce SF-2281 processor and SATA 6Gb/s interface. While a little late to the party, the Force Series GT is based on a well-seasoned platform that delivers quoted read speeds of 555MB/s and writes of 525MB/s with 85,000 IOPS. For buyers wanting the latest