Storage Hardware Topic Center

Everything you need to know about storage hardware: news, reviews, in-depth analysis, opinion and more

Samsung mass produces 1.4GBps PCIe flash cards for notebooks

Samsung has started mass shipments of its XP941 PCIe flash drive, a card for ultra-slim notebooks that delivers a sequential read performance of 1400MBps throughput.
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Apple's Mac move could spur PCIe flash flurry in other notebooks, desktops

With Apple's announcement that it'll bypass a SATA SSD in its Mac Pro and MacBook Air and go straight for the stratosphere of flash with a PCIe card, some pundits are speculating other laptops and desktop vendors may not be far behind.

WD ships its slimmest 1TB laptop hard drive

After announcing a 5mm high series of drives earlier this year, WD said it is now shipping the world's highest capacity 7mm-high laptop drive with up to 1TB of storage.

Western Digital releases its first 1.5TB mobile drive

HGST has announced its highest capacity 9.5mm-high mobile drive, a 1.5TB, three-platter model that is being targeted at the "prosumer" market.

Toshiba USB portable hard drive is also online file server

Toshiba is set to launch a portable USB hard drive that comes with PC or Mac software that can turn it into an Internet-accessible file server.

Cisco's new director-class storage switch boosts throughput 6X

Cisco's new director-class switch for storage, unveiled today, increases throughput six-fold and offers N+1 resilience.

WD shrinks laptop drives to just 5mm thick

Western Digital is now shipping what it said is the world's first 2.5-inch, 5mm hard drives and solid-state hybrid drives (SSHDs) for use in ultra-slim notebooks.

Next-gen USB SuperSpeed to eliminate power cords

USB SuperSpeed will move from 5Gbps bandwidth to 10Gbps in the coming year, but it's also leaping from 10 watts to 100 watts for charging, which could power monitors and even HDTVs.

IBM to invest $1B in flash memory development

After its buyout of Texas Memory Systems, IBM is now the latest on the vendor bandwagon to push flash into the data centers, saying it will invest a whopping $1 billion into flash research.

Samsung hits high gear, rolls out densest flash chip

Samsung today announced it is now mass-producing a 3-bit per cell, sub-20 nanometer class NAND flash chip that is the densest memory to date.

A NAS box for all seasons

We tested five Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances, ranging from 4T to 18TB in capacity and targeted for small offices and businesses with up to 20 to 25 users. All are more-or-less in the same price range: about $700 to $2,000 with drives.

Seagate Wireless Plus review: A terabyte of mobile wireless storage

Seagate's Wireless Plus drive offers a terabyte of storage and a way to stash your videos, photos, music and documents or wirelessly stream them to your mobile devices.

New storage technologies to deal with the data deluge

Enterprise storage demands are reaching a critical point, and vendors are scrambling to develop new products to deal with the data deluge. We look at how these technologies will help manage the major pain points for storage administrators.

How big is the sound of music?

Music fans and major recording artists are adopting lossless audio file formats to keep copies of their music that are as close to master recordings as possible, leading to multi-terabyte-sized home music storage systems.

Transcend ESD200 review: A fast little external SSD

Transcend's ESD200 external SSD is fast and very portable. Unfortunately, the backup software doesn't impress.

SanDisk Ultra Plus SSD review: Fast and inexpensive

The SanDisk Ultra Plus SSD, which sports data speeds of up to 530MB/s, is aimed squarely at replacing aging hard drives in existing desktops and laptops.

Storage systems get supersized

Old storage architectures with general-purpose controllers that service all the new functions along with the normal I/O workload won't be able to scale. Here's why storage systems will need to become full-scale storage computers. Insider (registration required)

Seagate Backup Plus review: Save your social media data

Seagates new line of Backup Plus drives is a convenient way to ensure data from your computer and from social networking sites is backed up.

Bye-bye, tapes: How to get the right disk backup appliance

Deduplicating backup appliances have become very popular, but choosing the right one means looking beyond deduplication. Insider (registration required)

What to ask when choosing a new storage platform

If you want to know what to buy, talk to people who've adopted the technology you're eyeing. Here are key questions to ask. Insider (registration required)