Icy Dock ToughArmor 6 HDD Hot Swap Mobile Rack
- Details
- Category: Storage
- Published: Monday, 03 February 2014 13:48
- Written by William
If you’re like me you like to back up files, install every game in your Steam library just because and record your favorite TV shows to your hard drive to enjoy them on your own time. This unfortunately takes up a lot of space and more often than not means you need more and more hard drives to sate your unhealthy obsession with storage but what happens when you run out of space to put your drives or even worse, your media PC is in a small mATX case? Icy Dock looks to come to the data hogs rescue with their ToughArmor 6x2.5" SATA HDD Hot Swap Mobile Rack which promises to give us a place to put 6 2.5” drives in a single 5.25” external bay. We’ll find out if this increase in storage is worth your time.
In the past we have taken a look at a variety of different SSD’s of all different sizes and shapes. Today we are going to check out something completely different. Today we are taking a look at a tiny 1.8 inch SSD that uses a PATA ZIF connection. For those of you who don’t know what a ZIF connection is, that is a zero insertion force connection. You typically see them inside of laptops and in this case this drive is normally used on small laptops and in some handheld devices. Being a PATA based (think IDE) these aren’t all about speed, but I wanted to check the drive out due to its size. So let’s take a look. 
With the Agility and Vertex product lines from OCZ in their fourth generations it was exciting to see OCZ change things up and introduce a new model late last year. With a unique design and an Indilinx controller inside it looks like it could really shake things up. I’m excited to see how it will perform, especially compared to the Agility 4 and Vertex 4 that we have recently taken a look at. OCZ gave it the Vector name and in some cases that means “a force or influence”, let’s find out if the OCZ Vector will be a force or influence in the SSD market. 
It wasn’t that long ago when we took a look at the 
When it comes to storage, there is no question that cloud storage is growing in importance every year. For some this is all that you might need, but if you are like me, you need a lot more than what is available on the cloud. When combined with laptops and multi computer households, adding more storage to just your PC isn’t always the best option. This is where Network Attached Storage comes in: you can have almost endless amounts of storage available in your home. Companies like Thecus have built on that with a collection of features like built in antivirus, Bit-Torrent support, and multimedia support. We are going to take a look at Thecus’s N5550, a 5-bay NAS with USB 3.0.
To say it’s been a while since we have taken a look at a Mushkin SSD would be an understatement. The last time we took a look at one of their SSD’s it was a SATA 2 drive. Things have moved on to bigger, cheaper, and faster things. Mushkin recently introduced their 7mm version of the Chronos Deluxe, a SATA 3 based SSD with advertised transfer speeds of up to 560MB/sec read and IOPS of 90,000. With numbers like that, I had to get my hands on it to see how it performed. How will it compare to all of the other drives with similar advertised performance numbers? Will this be your next SSD?
Earlier this year I had the chance to visit the OCZ offices. While being shown the offices I could sense the excitement. At that time they finally had the Indilinx crew in the office and they were very excited about how having an in house NAND Controller and firmware production would change the future of OCZ’s SSD business. The first drive that Indilinx had a hand in was the OCZ Vertex 4. Today we are going to put the Vertex 4 to the test in our new benchmark suite along with a few other SATA 3 drives to see how they perform. I hope that the same excitement that I saw in the OCZ offices will equal top notch performance from their current flagship SSD. 
By this time, we all should be familiar with the term "cloud" and what it means, and you probably already are using a cloud solution of some kind (either Dropbox, or Windows Live Mesh, or others). What about a personal cloud? A cloud that you can take with you everywhere you go that stores much more data than what you can put up in a Dropbox account. We have previously reviewed a 16GB product from Kingston, but lets take a look at something with a bit more storage. Today we will be looking at the 500GB Seagate GoFlex Satellite external WiFi hard drive, designed to give you access to media, particularly on your mobile devices, wherever you go.
In the beginning, there were platter hard drives. They would spend their lives spinning away into a data driven oblivion. 
So you do the smart thing, you backup your data from your laptop and your home PC to an external or network drive and go on with life feeling confident that you have gone well and above what most people do. For the most part, you did. What about when you’re traveling, have you seen how much abuse a device can take when on the go? For some people, and I know I’m one of them, some of the data you carry with you while traveling is more important than the laptop or device that you actually carry it on. In that situation you need a way to not have to worry about your data, no matter the situation, and to have a guarantee to back it up as well. The folks over at ioSafe focus specifically on this crowd. Not only do they offer products that are according to them build to handle almost anything, but they back it up with data recovery if something does happen. Today we are going to take a look at that Rugged Portable hard drive to see what all of the fuss is about, without any more buildup, let’s dig in.
I remember, early last year, thinking to myself; "Self, it would be totally awesome if they made an external hard drive that was battery operated and could connect to a WiFi network. No more USB cables!" Well, that time has arrived with several new products that have recently hit the market. Today, I would like to take a look at the Kingston Wi-Drive 16GB unit and see how it works, and more importantly, is it worth the money.
Earlier this month Star Trek: Online went the Free To Play model, meaning anyone can have their own starship and participate in one of the best science fiction franchises of all time! Why is that significant to this article? It is significant because I am a Trekkie. I openly admit it. When HornetTek contacted us to do some reviews on their products, this product definitely caught my eye for two reasons. One, I like hard drive enclosures and external storage solutions. Two, it is named "Enterprise". There is even a glimpse of the good 'ole 1701 on HornetTek's website.
If you are building a new computer, or looking for a great way to upgrade the performance of your current machine, many people recommend picking up a Solid State Drive instead of a spinning Hard Disk Drive. SSD's have several advantages of their spinning counterparts, including faster read and write times, and better reliability in environments where shocks and drops are common (like laptop computers). However, they do require some management that you might not be familiar with.
We used to work closely with Mushkin as far back as our first few LAN parties but over the past few years that communication slowed down. This year at CES we had a chance to catch up and see what they have been up to, and we were happy to see that on top of staying in the RAM market they have also introduced a couple SSD’s. Their newest SSD is called the Callisto Deluxe, and we will be taking an in depth look at it today. Sporting the SandForce SF-1200 controller and promising read speeds of up to 285MB/s and write speeds of up to 275MB/s, it sounds like it’s a perfect match for the Mushkin name. Of course there is only one way to find out; let’s jump in.
I have always been a big fan of Seagate’s FreeAgent Go lineup for some time. With only USB 2.0 drives being available up until the past year they were limited in speed by an aging interface. USB 3.0 came out but was only available to people who have 3.0 integrated on their motherboards. Seagate recognized this and designed a product lineup that is flexible enough to be used with any interface without having to buy different drives. Their GoFlex product line is an entire collection of drives, cables, and accessories that can be a little overwhelming. Today I am going to sort through it all and see if I can’t help break it all down. Let’s jump in!
Even with the price of SSD’s still out of range of some users we see an amazing variety of models giving the most hardcore and wealthy enthusiasts a great selection to pick from. OCZ itself manufactures a model for any price or performance range. We already took a look at their budget/mainstream focused Agility; today we have a chance to put their new Vertex 2 to the test. Will the added cost equal better performance?
When you first visit RunCore's website, you'll have to chose what sort of consumer you are: professional or 'prosumer'. For those unfamiliar with the latter, it's a hybrid word to describe a 'professional consumer', or if you will, an enthusiast. Today we look at a solid-state drive, a piece of hardware any PC enthusiast drools over, provided by RunCore, a China-based manufactuer focused on the production of high-end solid-state storage options.
When you hear the word Hybrid you may have images of Prius’s or maybe even the south park episode where they called all Hybrid owners fart sniffers. You may be surprised to find out that you can get hybrids in the computer industry, specifically in storage. With SSD’s gaining popularity it’s not a surprise that manufactures are looking at ways to bring SSD performance with a normal hard drives capacity and price. Today I have the chance to take a closer look at the Momentus XT from Seagate. This is a 2.5inch laptop drive with 4 gigs of SLC NAND (solid state flash) attached to the PCB to give you just that.
