SandForce’s SF-1200 controller has more or less taken the Solid State Drive world by storm, and with good reason. SandForce-based drives provide performance that’s consistently near the top of the heap, and benefits from not requiring DRAM for caching. It’s an appealing piece of hardware to build an SSD around so it’s no small surprise
Samsung has been playing in the consumer SSD space longer than most people know. It was their early SSDs that graced the likes of Sony ultraportable notebooks and found their way in other high-end premium builds from many other brands. But not until recently have consumers been able to trot out to the store to
Western Digital recently released their latest entry in the media streamer space. While the earlier editions of WD’s TV Live family fared well, renewed competition from Apple, Roku, Netgear and others mean that to succeed with a steaming device you have to accomplish several goals, foremost among them a nice interface, ease of use, ease
Western Digital has both announced and started shipping their 5th generation Caviar Green hard drive. Of course the major highlight this time around is the monster 3TB capacity, a first for internal 3.5" hard drives. WD accomplishes this feat by leveraging Advanced Format and four 750GB platters. In addition to the 3TB model (WD30EZRSDTL) there’s
When building a media PC, selecting the proper optical drive is crucial. To that end we’ve been working with LiteOn’s newest high definition optical drive, the Blu-ray capable IHBS112. This drive has the ability to read and write Blu-ray discs as well as your typical DVD and CD media. This model is currently listed as
Mechanical hard drives may not be big performance breadwinners anymore, but in notebooks they’re still the order of the day. Unless you’re buying a big 17” mobile workstation or desktop replacement, your notebook is liable to be stuck with a single drive bay. So you’re left with a choice: cheap and effective, or high performance
The Icy Dock MB994SP-4S allows you to fit up to 4TB additional storage in your desktop. In just one 5.25″ device bay it fits four 2.5” hard drives or SSDs, including 15mm height SAS and SATA drives.
SandForce solid state drives seem to be the hotness in the market right now, and why wouldn’t they be? The SandForce controllers are popular pieces of technology for a reason: their design allows for dispensing with drive cache, and they perform awfully fast. It’s no surprise many manufacturers have produced drives based on SandForce hardware,
The Spinpoint F4 features a single 320GB capacity model, but that’s 320GB on a single drive platter. That platter spins at 7200 RPM and feeds 16MB of drive cache. By using a single platter and a single drive head, the SpinPoint F4 benefits from both a greater platter density and a reduced number of moving
The 2TB Seagate Barracuda LP brings us to the end of our review series covering the latest high-capacity/low-power drives–a series that has also featured looks at the latest Western Digital Caviar Green and Samsung Spinpoint offerings competing in this space.
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