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Category: Storage
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Published: Wednesday, 20 December 2017 21:58
Back in August I took a look at the new WD My Passport SSD and was impressed with its performance and form factor. While it does have an SSD inside it wasn’t really designed to take a beating, something that might happen when you use a drive a lot and it gets tossed around. Well, Western Digital owns SanDisk as well and along with the My Passport SSD they had also sent over the SanDisk Extreme 510 Portable SSD. It is a completely different design and it is designed to handle a little more rough handling. Today I’m going to check it out and see what they are doing differently with this model and take a look at its overall performance.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Wednesday, 09 August 2017 12:04
When it comes to data storage there are all different form factors and options. If you have a huge computer and don’t need to transport the data you can just toss a hard drive in and you are good to go. I take advantage of network attached storage for most of the data around the house but I also used a few flash drives for on the go. But when you need more space the thumb drive options get expensive, huge, and they aren’t exactly fast as well. So you are left with a portable hard drive but again speeds are terrible. Well recently SSDs have been making it into the portable market and the WD My Passport SSS really caught my eye to be paired with my Ultrabook for when I’m on the go and between test benches around the office. With a small form factor and a Type-C connection, it looks to be what need but first today I want to put it to the test and see how it performs.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Friday, 24 March 2017 07:34
When it comes to SSDs most people these days are starting to focus on NVMe drives or at least M.2 drives. There is still interest and need for SATA drives as well though. A lot of the SATA drives have been focused on cheaper TLC based NAND but there is still a need for MLC NAND and that’s where the OCZ VX500 that was introduced last fall has been hanging out. It’s designed as a replacement for the OCZ Vector 180. They have dropped the Barefoot 3 controller and moved to a Toshiba based TC358790. That combined with the MLC NAND has me excited to finally take a look at the VX500 and see how it performs and where it fits in today’s marketplace.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Monday, 20 February 2017 11:27
Last year ADATA introduced their SU800 as part of a complete line of 3D NAND based SSDs. It is their mid-ranged model with the SU900 being their highest end SATA based SSD but comes in at a price point that Is budget friendly as well. The SU800 is also the first 3D NAND SSD on the market from a company that doesn’t make their own NAND. So today I’m going to take a look inside the drive and see what it’s all about and also test its performance to see how it compares to other SATA based drives. Is this the SATA SSD for your next build? The price is right and they have the capacities, but let’s find out.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Friday, 21 October 2016 10:54
You may not have noticed, but not only have PCs been getting smaller but devices like notebooks, phones, and tablets have been taking over. It doesn’t mean that the PC is going away as some people would like you to think, but it does mean that fewer devices have the capability to hold bulk storage. Sure SSDs are getting bigger and computers have some room, but enthusiasts, geeks, and professionals used to load up their main PCs with hard drives and the PC market is moving away from that. You could go with an external drive but they don’t really have the capacity as well. Because of that, the home NAS market has been picking up and more and more people are realizing that a central storage location is helpful for the whole family. In our case, I moved to NAS storage years ago to cut back on electricity from having servers running in the house. We have had one for my attached office and another with video files but recently those have filled up and I’ve been looking at new options. While doing that I thought it would be a great time to take a look at what QNAP has going on so they sent over their TS-451+. My past NAS have been powered by slower CPUs and over time his has caused slowdowns when running RAID so I’m excited to see how the TS-451+ performs with its Intel quad core. So let’s dive in.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Wednesday, 31 August 2016 20:53
Well, it wasn’t that long ago that Toshiba picked up OCZ and brought the OCZ brand into their lineup as their enthusiast oriented brand. So it may take a little while to adjust to the new Toshiba branding sitting next to the OCZ, but for those concerned with any OCZ issues in the past, having Toshiba backing the brand now should be reassuring. On top of the new branding, Toshiba has also introduced their first M.2 PCIe drive with the RD400. The RD stands for the previous Revo Drive branding from OCZ and this drive was originally shown off as a Revo Drive. The drive has a native PCIe controller and is an NVMe drive so we can expect performance to be significantly better than any of the SATA based drives. Today I’m going to check out the drive and then run it through our testing to see just how it performs.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Wednesday, 27 July 2016 15:53
When you think of innovation in the storage industry you typically think of things like M.2 and SATA Express that help enable even faster transfer speeds. Well, a while back I was contacted by a lesser known company in the storage industry called Apacer. They had all of the standard products of course but there was one specific product that really caught my eye. This was their AS720 SSD, at first glance, it wasn’t especially innovative. But I noticed that along with the SATA connection on one end, it also had a new USB 3.1 Type C connection on the other end. This really got me thinking about how useful an SSD with dual interfaces could be. For starters, it is worlds smaller than the normal 2.5 inch USB storage devices because it doesn’t need a thick casing on top of the hard drive or SSD like most external USB drives. I was also thinking about how useful it could be when cloning your old drive to your new SSD, especially with laptops that aren’t going to have two SATA connections. So today I’m going to take a look at Apacer’s dual interface SSD. I’m going to dig inside and see what makes it tick, then test both interfaces to see just how well they both perform.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Thursday, 31 December 2015 19:24
With cloud storage I would forgive you if you haven’t thought to much about USB thumb drives recently, I know I have for the most part only been using thumb drives in a few situations where I used to do all of my work directly off of one. The thing is there are situations where the cloud just doesn’t work. A good example of this is with large files but it also can be important when security is a concern and also for installing windows and device drivers. Because of that I have kept a Kingston DataTraveler HyperX drive around. I keep movies and TV shows on it and keep it with my laptop normally because the SSD on my laptop is limited in size. Recently though Kingston introduced a new USB drive in their HyperX brand, the HyperX Savage. They dropped the DataTraveler branding all together and they jumped up to USB 3.1. Today I’m going to take a look at it and find out how it compares to its older brother.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Wednesday, 28 October 2015 17:25
After Toshiba picked up the bankrupt OCZ we have seen OCZ drives move to using Toshiba NAND. With the launch of the Trion 100 though things are a little different. For the first time this is full Toshiba drive that is branded with the OCZ branding. The Trion falls in OCZs product lineup as a budget drive under both the Vertex and Vector drives. The Trion 100 is the first TLC based drive for OCZ, TLC (Triple Level Cell) is similar to MLC but with an additional layer to provide a higher storage density and with that help lower costs as well. So today I’m going to dig into the Trion 100 and find out what makes it tick and then run it through our performance testing to find out how well it performs. Then at the end of the day we will put all of that together along with the price and find out if the Trion 100 is the budget drive for you.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Friday, 19 June 2015 13:40
Considering how often I spend taking photos in the office as well as all of our photos when at events. I can say without a doubt that having to pull the SD card out of the camera, walk across the room and plug it into the PC, then sit down and pull everything off of the card takes up far more time than it should be. Eyefi has been on the market for a long time with their WiFi enabled cards but for various reasons I have always put off getting on. Recently I decided that we should check them out and finally see if they are worth all of the hype. So today we are going to take a look at their standard Eyefi Mobi in an 8GB capacity while using it for photos around the house and the office.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Friday, 05 June 2015 16:10
Over the last few months I have had the chance to check out a whole list of different SSD’s from a wide range of manufactures. For the most part all of them are sporting the new Phison S10 controller. While those drives have been fast I couldn’t help but notice that the OCZ drives that I tested well over a year ago were right up there holding their own. That got me wondering what the new PCZ drive is capable so I asked to check out the new Vector 180. Today I’m going to dig into it and see what they have going on and then run it through our benchmark suite to see how it performs to find out how it compares to everyone else’s new flagship drives.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Wednesday, 13 May 2015 16:58
So a lot of people might not know it but the new M.2 SSDs are actually very versatile. You can run them as a direct PCIe drive with a x2 or x4 connection or you can even run a standard SATA drive on M.2. It wasn’t long ago that I took a look at the Patriot Ignite SSD, well it just so happens Patriot send over another Ignite SSD. This time they sent over their brand new Ignite M2. The Ignite M2 is a SATA based M.2 drive. In other words with this being a SATA drive we still work under the limitations of the SATA interface but with that we keep costs down. Where this comes in handy is in builds where not having to run a 2.5 inch drive is best. So we know this is up my alley, not having to pack in a 2.5 inch drive would save a lot of trouble in some of our LANrigs! So let’s see what the Ignite M2 is all about and then run it through our standard benchmark suite.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Tuesday, 05 May 2015 21:54
Last week I took a look at Kingston’s latest HyperX SATA SSD the Savage. Now today I have the chance to look at their flagship SSD the Predator. The Predator is an M.2 x4 drive that is available with and without a PCI Express card to M.2 adapter. For our testing today I will be using it with the adapter to see what everyone can expect for performance, but if your PC supports a x4 M.2 slot you can save yourself a lot of space and keep a PCIe slot open by running the drive through it. M.2 is the replacement for mSATA. Running the drive over M.2 gives a direct connection to the CPU and when run in a x4 configuration it gives us up to 20GB/s bandwidth. In other words for the first time in a long time we aren’t limited by the SATA connection. With that I’m extremely excited to see what the Predator is capable of!
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Category: Storage
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Published: Tuesday, 28 April 2015 17:34
When it comes to SSD shopping you have to consider your budget, speed requirements, and also your brand preference. For me personally, I have been using Kingston drives in basically all of my builds as well as all of our test benches for a few years now. This is partly because Kingston has always been great about supporting us but it is also because when I visit their offices and their US manufacturing I watched them jump through hoops testing and retesting their Memory. I realized that they take their quality very serious and for me more than anything else I can’t afford to have my SSD die. So while there have been other drives that are faster, I stuck with them. Why am I telling you this today? Well that is because today I will be taking a look at a MUCH needed new SSD in their product line called the Savage. The Savage line from HyperX isn’t new, they have a nice set of RAM under the name already but today they officially introduce the new SSD. So kick back for a few while I dig into the HyperX Savage SSD and see what it is all about.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Thursday, 02 April 2015 18:55
You may not know it, but over the past few years we as gamers and enthusiasts have been smack dab in the middle of a bit of a revolution. Sure games don’t seem to push hardware as much as they used too and the focus has been on higher resolutions. But on the storage front performance has been improving with leaps and bounds. Here at LanOC our first hard drive review came about around the same time that the first consumer SSDs were hitting the market. When tested that hard drive saw an average read speed of about 75MB/s. Our first SSD review a few months later put down an impressive 214.6 MB/s. After that we saw speeds increase to 300 and then recently to around 550 MB/s. PCIe drives have performed better than that but none of them promise to put down numbers like todays review. Today I’m going to check out Intel’s first consumer focused PCIe drive that happens to also use NVMe.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Wednesday, 01 April 2015 18:39
Even after our LAN this weekend I’m not burnt out on all of the storage talk, so it is only fitting that I continue our streak of SSD reviews. Today I have a drive from Patriot in the office. Specifically their new Ignite in a 480GB capacity. The Ignite is one of three recently introduced drives from Patriot with this being their flagship drive. The Ignite features the same Phison's quad-core, eight-channel PS3110-S10 controller that we also saw on the Mushkin Striker last week so we know just how well it can perform. This is fitting because both Patriot and Mushkin focus on bringing the best possible performance at the best possible price. So today I’m going to run the Ignite though our benchmark suite and see how it compares to everything I have tested recently and then see how good of a deal the drive is as well. Could this be the SSD for your next build? Let’s find out.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Wednesday, 25 March 2015 15:30
Last week I took a look at Mushkins new flagship SSD. Well it just so happens I also had another Mushkin SSD floating around the office to review. This one isn’t anything like the Striker. The Chronos is a little older but with that it is also a little better value when you are shopping. Our sample is the big guy with a 480GB capacity but it is priced to compete. So today I’m going to see what is inside of the Chronos and most importantly I am going to figure out if the aging Sandforce controller is still fast enough to justify a purchase for someone who is on a budget.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Friday, 20 March 2015 23:28
This year at CES Mushkin introduced their upcoming lane of SSDs called the Striker. Up until now, most of their SSDs have been in the Chronos product line. A change in name along with performance improvements are welcomed. The Striker series of SSDs run a quad core 8 channel Phison controller with Micron's 16nm 128Gbit MLC NAND. In the case of our sample, it has an impressive 480GBs of storage. They suggest that the drive will have read speeds up to 565MB/sec and write speeds up to 550MB/sec so today I am going to put it through our benchmark suite and find out if that is really the case. Before then though I am also going to dig inside and see what is inside as well. Enjoy!
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Category: Storage
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Published: Friday, 20 February 2015 17:52
A few years ago only a few people were running an SSD in their computer. These days though most enthusiasts and gamers are sporting one. Why? Because they speed up your computer in areas that even the fastest CPU or video card can’t do. The thing is if you got in on it all early, you are most likely running a small OS only drive. Well if you haven’t noticed prices have been dropping, for what you spent on that 60GB drive you can get the Corsair Force Series LX 256GB. Not only will that hold your OS but now you can installed a few more programs on it as well. In fact you should be able to run everything you need off of your SSD with the exception being if you are like me and install every steam game you own. You should keep some of that on a second hard drive. Today I’m going to take a look and see how the budget focused LX drive performs and find out if it is currently the best deal to be found.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Monday, 26 January 2015 08:42
Having had the opportunity to work and support home and small office environments, the necessity for things like redundancy, ease of access, and perhaps more importantly granularity of access are extremely obvious. Things that a NAS can provide, but rarely are invested in for one reason or another. The fear of cost or expertise often leads to that heart-breaking conversation where you relay the news that their presentation went up in flames with their failed hard drive, or early morning support calls due to permission issues. Thecus has several NAS offerings on the table, and we've had a look at a few of them. Today we'll sit down with the N4560, a NAS targeted for this very SOHO situation, in which Thecus hopes to address a few of the examples here and beyond.
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