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

OCZ was first to market with an SSD based on the SandForce SF-2281 processor. The Vertex 3 ripped through our benchmarks and easily topped all other SSDs in the market. Just two weeks ago, they let us know about the Vertex 3 Max IOPS, which uses a change in NAND to drive IOPS performance from

Crucial announced their next generation SSDs at Storage Visions in January of this year. The enthusiast class Crucial m4 SSD offers capacities up to 512GB, a speedy SATA 6Gb/s interface, home-grown 25nm Micron NAND and an exclusive Marvell 9174-BLD2 processor. The combination nets 415MB/s read speeds and 260MB/s writes with support for up to 72TBW.

In March, Western Digital announced an extension to their My Book Studio Edition II dual-drive storage system; a 6TB version featuring two 3TB Caviar Green hard drives. Designed largely for creative types on Mac platforms, the My Book Studio Edition II offers a quad interface; eSATA, FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0, Time Machine support and internal RAID0 and

OWC’s Mercury Extreme Pro was one of our favorite SF-1200 SSDs at the time, and remains a solid performer today. But the new wave of SATA 6Gb/s has enthusiasts excited about taking SSD performance to the next level. The OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G does just that and more, leveraging the new SandForce SF-2281 processor

At CES in January of this year, Corsair surprised us by announcing a line of SATA 6Gb/s SSDs based on the Marvell 9174 processor. What appeared to be a departure from Corsair’s use of the SandForce line of processors turns out to be a supplemental deal. The Marvell partnership let Corsair get a SATA 6Gb/s SSD

Up until now, if a drive had 1TB or more of capacity it was automatically assumed to be a desktop drive. Not anymore – the Samsung MT2 1TB is a 2.5-inch, 12.5mm height hard drive for use in external enclosures and notebook computers. Check out our review to see the upsides and downsides of this