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

Intel SSDs are best known for providing good performance, compatibility, and reliability. We take the company’s latest, the 510 series, and put it in RAID levels 0, 1, 5, and 6, plus a special four-drive RAID 0 configuration and achieve some astonishing performance numbers. To get an idea of just how fast these drives are,

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