OCZ has taken market stratification to its textbook definition with their ever growing SSD family. Within the SATA 6Gb/s space, they offer four drives (in order of performance) including the Vertex 3 Max IOPS, Vertex 3, Agility 3 and our subject today, the Solid 3. Being at the back of the line though isn’t always

When it comes to desktop-based high-performance storage, to get to the bleeding edge there are certain limits you have to work around. A single SATA SSD, no matter how fast it is, will be held back by the 6.0Gb/s bandwidth. To get around this, many opt for the PCIe interface, either by using a RAID

The recent refresh of notebooks by Lenovo and others has given users new storage options by way of an mSATA port. Previously the ThinkPads, for instance, had such a port but it was used for things like wireless cards, never being properly enabled for use with SSDs. Now, along with Lenovo, vendors like Asus and

With 7mm ultra-thin hard drives all the rage, Hitachi aims to blast one out of the park with its new 500GB single-platter Z5K500 – that’s right, 500GB on a single platter. Getting to this higher capacity in such a slim package has been a big deal for drive manufactures, since in the 7mm drive space

In the business notebook market, one segment that separates the men from the boys is the workstation-class status. While business-class systems will offer durable chassis, excellent keyboards, great battery life, and easy long-term IT management; workstations offer an enhanced level of performance, not unlike what you might expect from a high-end desktop. In this review

Icy Dock is perhaps the most prolific storage accessory company out there – case in point, in this review we look at a trio of 2.5″ to 3.5″ conversion kits. With street prices ranging from $15 to $30, the products are designed for almost any budget and interface need. On the high end is the

If you took one of Synology’s 4-bay NAS systems designed for 3.5″ hard drives and blasted it with a shrink-ray, you would find yourself holding the miniature in stature, but big on features DiskStation DS411slim. The slim is still a 4-bay unit though, it just uses 2.5″ drives to reduce the device footprint to a

The OCZ Agility 3 fills the mid-range gap of OCZ’s SSD lineup; but don’t let “mid-range” or “mainstream” fool you. The Agility 3 uses a SATA 6Gb/s interface and the SandForce SF-2281 processor to drive 525MB/s read speeds, 500MB/s writes and 45,000 4KB random write IOPS – those are just a hair under the Vertex

The Torqx 2 is a new line of SSDs from Patriot Memory, which was announced and started shipping at the beginning of the month. Available in 32GB to 256GB capacities, the SATA 3Gb/s drive uses a rarely seen Phison controller to deliver read speeds of 270MB/s and writes of 230MB/s. We put this 2.5-inch drive