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The practice of using unbranded peripherals in computers is a common one, and even more so in the case of Apple, who takes it a step further by demanding that components such as the SSDs are proprietary through small the reassignment of circuitry within the SSD. Not only can the SSD in Apple’s new Mac products not be upgraded with third-party SSDs, but also, they can’t even be switched off with SSDs of previous Apple releases. Simply, the high-capacity SSD of your 2012 Apple MBA will not work in your 2013 MBA.
As the popularity of NAS devices (or NAS servers as we like to call them) keeps increasing every day naturally many of you expect from us to focus in getting some of the latest models to hit the market from all the major players for testing purposes. Well lately we've seen the introduction of not only expensive models designed and manufactured by both old and new companies with business customers as their main target audience but also low and mid-end ones developed mostly for house and office use. That being said with the current state of HDD prices it really doesn't come as a surprise to see that consumers are not as interested in single bay models as they are in dual and quad ones and who can blame them since having at least one more available bay for future expansion is the obvious choice. So for the past two weeks we've been putting the latest quad bay NAS server to hit the market by QNAP the TurboNAS TS-420 through rigorous testing to see if it has what it takes to win the hearts of home and office users.
The TS-470 Pro, 670 pro and 870 Pro are available with 4, 6 and 8 bays, and all run on a powerful Intel Core i3 3220 Ivy Bridge processor. They have 2 GB of RAM and 512 MB dedicated storage for the OS. They come with two Gigabit LAN ports, and with an expansion slot you can add two extra Gigabit ports or a 10 Gigabit port.
Who says you can never have enough storage. Well you really can not have too much. I myself have a few different computers around my house for different tasks, and I like to back them up and also share files over the network. External hard drives and enclosures are a great tool for keeping around your house or even on the go. There are so many different enclosures and NAS boxes on the market. Some do RAID, other’s do JBOD, some can hold only 1 drive and some can go up to 4 drives. Some of the cool things with the technology of the past few years is that we now have eSATA and USB 3.0. USB 3.0 offers up to 5 Gbps while eSATA offers less speed at around 3 Gbps. So today we will be reviewing the Vantec NexStar HX2R dual SATA Hard Drive Enclosure, so stick around and see if it would make a nice addition to your desk or office.
Have you ever had the feeling that no matter how much available space you carry around with you it's just never enough when the time comes to actually put it to good use? Well to be entirely honest i have felt that quite a few times in my life but what's really even more annoying is to have plenty of available storage space with you only to find out that there's not enough speed to make use of it all in the time window that you have. The introduction of USB 3.0 a few years back was a step towards the right direction since in theory it's up to 10 times faster than the older USB 2.0 but to date with the exception of portable SSDs there aren't really many storage related media that come even close to its possible data transfer speeds and that includes the majority of USB 3.0 compatible flash drives in the market. Well Patriot Memory wants to change or at least improve on that and so their latest SuperSonic Magnum USB 3.0 Flash Drive line doesn't only offer capacities up to 256GB but it's also pretty much as fast as it gets (at least currently).
Late last year I had a look at one of the latest flash drives to roll off the Mach Xtreme production line, featuring 16GB of SLC NAND within its slim read body and a suitably reasonable price tag to go along with it. Now, nearly a year on, I’m going to be taking a look at the 32GB SKU of the same MX-ES SLC drive that I looked at last year.
As a brief re-run over the history of Mach Xtreme, they are one of the leading storage manufacturers for flash products and over the last couple of years, they have been focussing on the MX-ES line of drives with its SLC NAND design.For a few people out there, SLC is common knowledge, but for those that do not know, this refers to the build up of the NAND flash, in this case with a Single Level Cell in instead of a Multi Level Cell design that we typically see in flash drives. Over the MLC design, SLC does not suffer from the same high wear rates and at the same time offers up a better write performance. The downside of this is that SLC NAND takes up a greater space over the much denser MLC and also the production costs are also higher.
As we’ve seen before, the MX-ES drive comes attached to a card with a plastic cover. The front side of the card is packed with information of the drive, including its five year warranty, SLC flash design and that it is ‘optimised’ for Asus motherboards – although the latter we showed to be inconclusive last time round with our testing.
Today’s review is of MyDigitalSSD’s SuperCache 2 mSATA 128GB SSD, and the FNet HybriDisk caching software. A license key for the HybriDisk software is included with the purchase of the SuperCache 2. How does a caching SSD work? It works in conjunction with a hard drive disk (HDD) to create what the operating system sees as a single, combined storage partition. A caching SSD utilizes specialized software to determine what programs, data, and/or files that the user accesses most frequently. This “hot” data will be held in a dedicated “caching” partition on the SSD for much quicker access when called for. Less frequently requested data will still reside on the HDD, until such time as it becomes frequently accessed enough to be moved to the SSD cache. What is stored on the SSD cache is dynamic, and changes over time based on actual usage.
Toshibas competing product comes in the form of the Toshiba Q Series Pro, which we’ll be reviewing today. Toshiba appears to have modeled their SSD lineup off of Samsung’s highly successful 840 Series with Toshiba releasing their latest Q Series and the Q Series Pro SSDs. The Toshiba Q Series Pro offers greater performance in comparison to its vanilla sibling...
We've mentioned this a few times recently, but you really can't deny the fact that the controller used for the Kingston HyperX Navi Limited Edition is becoming obsolete. The LSI SandForce SF-2281 controller came out in 2011 and was state of the art, but today there are many better options. There is a good reason for why it's still a popular controller, and that's because it's the only turn-key solution complete with software.
Today we take a look at the latest entry in Synology's single bay NAS solutions, the DS114. Running the same OS we find on their more advanced models it could be the ideal model for the storage novice to use for their first network based device.
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