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

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