state

Intel today announced the availability of a series of solid-state drives with a 60GB version selling for $89, the least expensive dollars-per-gigabyte drive to date from Intel.

The 330 Series use a SATA 6 gigabit-per-second (Gb/s), giving "consumers a more affordable entry into the accelerated storage performance of SSDs," Intel said in a statement. The SATA 6Gb/s interface doubles the bandwidth of its current SATA 3Gb/s Intel SSD 320 Series. … Read more

Before solid-state drives (SSD), Western Digital's Raptor family of hard drives had always been the fastest internal drive for consumers. And spinning at 10,000 RPM, these drives are still very fast though offering less storage than other 7,200rpm hard drives.

That gap has just gotten narrower; the company announced today the latest VelociRaptor hard drive that caps at 1TB of storage space.

While 1TB seems small compared with other 3.5-inch hard drives that offer up to 4TB, the new VelociRaptor, like the previous two generations, actually comes in the 2.5-inch standard. However, it is extra thick and has an added metal frame to be as physically big as a regular 3.5-inch hard drive. … Read more

If you've been wondering when Thunderbolt is available for Windows, the answer is now.

LaCie, one of the two storage companies that participated in the introduction of the Thunderbolt standard, told me today that it will be showing off two Thunderbolt devices, the Little Big Disk SSD and the 2big Thunderbolt, at NAB Show 2012.

While these two devices are not new, this is going to be the first time they are demoed on both platforms: Mac and Windows. Up to now, Thunderbolt has been available only to Macs, exclusively. LaCie also revealed that the support for Thunderbolt in … Read more

When it comes to ultrabooks, you have to pick between a solid-state drive (SSD) or a hard drive as the main storage drive. The former is generally limited in terms of capacity, expensive but very fast, while the latter offers much more storage space for a much lower cost.

If you're willing to go with a hard drive, WD now offers another option.

The company announced today the availability of the new single-platter WD Scorpio Blue hard drive. The drive still uses the 2.5-inch standard but is just 7mm thick, as opposed to 9.5mm in regular laptop hard drives. … Read more

Micron Technology has updated its RealSSD C400 series of solid-state drives for small mSATA packages.

Basically, Micron is delivering the same performance of previous C400 products but in a 1.2 x 2.0 inch (3cm x 5cm) mSATA size -- the size typically used in thin laptops.

SSDs are faster than the standard spinning hard disk drives found in mainstream laptops (and often a lot faster).

The higher-capacity Micron models deliver the best performance. For example, the 256GB version has a read rate of 500 megabytes per second (MB/s) and write speed of 260 MB/s. The smaller-capacity … Read more

How much fun can you have adding funny text to someone else's photograph? If you're the U.S. secretary of state, apparently quite a lot.

It's already been proven that if you let the general public add their own cute sayings to pictures of cats, you can build an entire empire on top of it. And now, thanks to the Tumblr blog Texts from Hillary, you too can create your own snarky narrative involving, yes, pictures of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton texting.

It started as a quirky site where random people can make submissions … Read more

New Intel solid-state drives are aimed at boosting Windows startup and wake times, making them a hardware feature that will be especially applicable to Windows 8.

The Intel SSD 313 Series offers what is in effect a solid-state drive cache, increasing the "responsiveness" of PCs that are based on hard disk drives -- that being a word Intel and Microsoft throw around a lot these days.

Responsiveness is code for the kind of instant-on experience you get on a tablet or smartphone.

And both Windows 8 PCs (think: ultrabooks) and tablets should offer that kind of responsiveness as … Read more

The 2.5-inch standard Vertex 4 solid-state drive (SSD) is a clear signal that OCZ wants to move to use its own Indilix Everest controllers rather than those from SandForce, which was used in the Vertex 3.

And that would be a good decision. The new Vertex 4 now uses the second generation (Everest 2) of the controller and offered great performance in my testing.

It's the first SSD I've seen that took just a second to be formatted and was immediately recognized by the system when used as a secondary drive.… Read more

This is an update of a post from a few months ago.

For a long time I was a solid-state-drive naysayer. I'd heard mixed things about their performance and longevity, and I certainly wasn't a fan of their sky-high prices.

But SSDs have improved considerably over the years, to the point where they're now a highly desirable alternative to traditional hard drives.

Indeed, a good SSD is usually significantly faster, and it consumes less power -- a big consideration for battery-conscious laptop users. Also, because it has no moving parts, it's much less susceptible to damage.… Read more