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Over recent years, mSATA drives have typically been a component that has not been on the forefront of the consumer market, seen only really by OEM manufacturers or by those who opened up their systems. With the market shifting towards smaller and smaller systems, and advances in technology allowing for denser storage and computing power as a whole, we are now seeing mSATA drive appear on the consumer market in greater numbers and more importantly, bigger capacities.
This is not the first time I’ve looked at an mSATA drive, a few months back I had a look at one of ADATA’s smaller capacity drives, the SP300 24GB - aimed more for SSD caching and small OS footprints that require little read and write speeds such as POS systems.
With speeds and capacities now at a level that most users would deem acceptable for day to day use, and the number of systems and motherboards that support them such as laptops and ASUS’ ROG motherboards growing and more importantly the introductions of Intel’s Next Unit of Computing (NUC), seeing what is out there in the mSATA market is something very worth while.
Corsair started off as one of the biggest manufacturers of computer RAM modules but nowadays they are also renowned for their power supplies, cooling solutions and SSD drives. Not two weeks ago we reviewed the fastest SSD they currently produce, a Force GT series drive. Today we are having a look at the Force 3 SSD, a drive using the same controller as the premium Force GT SSD. We are going to examine the drive’s synthetic and real world performance in this review.
MemoRight takes on the mSATA market with a new SandForce SATA III design and manages to put 256GB of flash on it.
When it comes in SATA 6GB/s solid state drives or solid state drives in general there are a few names that come to mind, OCZ, Kingston and Patriot are just a few but Samsung is not really one of the them. For the consumer market Samsung gave us the 470 series drive and now they have entered the SATA 6GB/s segment with the 830 series. What is interesting about this drive is that it uses Samsung’s own controller, NAND and DRAM. Something we have not seen on any solid state drive that we have reviewed. The 830 series has rated speeds of 520MB/s read and 320MB/s write. Let’s see how this drive stacks up against other SATA 6GB/s drives that we have tested.
If you are reading these lines then you should be well aware that the two main reasons behind the increasing demands in storage capacity all of us have are the continuous speed upgrades we have been enjoying in internet bandwidth during the past 10 years in most places around the globe combined of course with the wide availability in Full HD/HD media content. Because of that most people (namely casual users, gamers and even some overclockers) naturally put the usual capacity/price ratio above performance and especially nowadays with the current state of the economy i can't really blame them for doing that (besides mostly for backup purposes you don't really need the best possible performance factor). However there are many enterprise users, professionals and enthusiasts out there who always place performance and data integrity above the usual capacity/price ratio and this is where 2.5" SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) drives like the latest Toshiba MK3001GRRB come in.
SuperSSpeed delivered the best two prong approach to the SSD market yet. SLC flash for enthusiasts/prosumers and MLC flash for mainstream/power users. Today we look at the MLC portion and like the last couple of reviews this one has TRIM now as well.
Today we have one of the 320 Series SSDs connected to our test system and will find out what it offers and whether it can compete with its main competition, a SandForce based model of similar capacity, in a selection of real world and synthetic tests.
Our attendance at the Samsung Global SSD Summit in South Korea a few months back brought us our first glimpse of a new standard in ultrabook storage performance. At the Summit, the Samsung XP941 M.2 PCIe SSD was displayed reaching 1GB/s transfer speeds and Apple has since released their 2013 MacBook Air which has a customized variation of the XP941; this attaining native performance of 794MB/s. Most recently, Sony released their newest Vaio Pro 13 which also appears to have the XP 941 installed and there is no doubt this ‘trickle effect’ of distribution will become a waterfall soon enough. For the first time, even our request for XP941 review sample was put on hold as Samsung can’t seem to keep up with demand.
If you are looking for maximum storage capacity in a 2.5” form factor drive which has not only the most storage space to date, but also has out-performed 3.5” drives that has come before it, Western Digital has released their new Scorpio Blue 1 terabyte 2.5” drive. This small form factor has opened a whole new world to laptop users who are looking for storage space that can perform and still have a reasonable price.
Up to now we've been looking at network storage servers that come with no drives and are produced by a company other than a drive manufacturer. Western Digital are one of the best hard drive manufacturers our there in the market and their recent changes to their product line-up has not only made choosing the right drive for the job easier, but also a lot clearer. When it comes to network storage, WD has three types of drive that are geared for the job, Red, SE and RE. Red drives are still aimed for the home/SOHO user, whilst their enterprise SE and RE drives are optimised for the constant punishment that they will encounter 24x7.
Setting drives aside, WD has now come out with their own NAS solution, optimised for their own drives, in an all-in-one easy to use solution and so we get the Sentinel DX4000. The Sentinel is a first in a line of self designed NAS solutions that can be purchased with drives pre-installed in a variety of capacities, varying from a modest 2TB, right up to a whopping 16TB. Unlike other NAS solutions on the market, one of the main features that sets this system apart from the rest is the use of Windows Storage Server 2008 and a auto configuration process during the initial set-up that automatically builds the drives into a RAID5 array - the preferred choice for NAS solutions as this gives the best data security and will ensure no data is lost, should one drive fail during operation.
With this unit designed specifically for the SMB environment the use of WSS 2008 should allow for seamless integration through active directory and domain configuration and also for those that are at home with Windows, should make maintaining the system a bit more intuitive. With RAID automatically configured based on the number of drives installed, set-up should be easier as mentioned and knowing how well trusted and reliable Western Digital's drives are in the NAS markets with multiple lines of drives targeted at this environment, there is good hope that the system has a lot to give.
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