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RunCore's 1TB SATA III SSD is 3.5-inches and 1TB big, 500MB/s fast
Your average SSD fits in a laptop friendly 2.5-inch slot and does so meekly, not calling too much attention to itself. RunCore's next SSD powerhouse, however, is a little more bodacious. It takes up a desktop standard 3.5-inch slot and is said to rely on "substantial" sized PCBs on both sides of its cool, cerulean silicon. It's an SATA III drive offering a similarly substantial 1TB of storage, even fronting dual SandForce SF-1222 controllers for integrated RAID 0 performance. The result? 500MB/s speed, meaning this hippo does that tutu right. No pricing has been announced yet, but expect an appropriately large MSRP when it is fully announced at CeBIT in March.
The joy and pain of upgrading a 27-inch iMac with an SSD (video)
As the old Chinese proverb says: "Time flies like an arrow." Just like that, today -- coincidentally the 27th -- marks the one year anniversary of my Core i7 27-inch iMac. No words can express the satisfaction of having such sheer screen estate and computing power all encased in one gorgeous body, but said joy started to fade recently -- ask my colleagues and they'll testify to my regular rants about the darn machine freezing up over the last few weeks. I've had it with the bloody hard drive, and being a geek who's pimped up his last two laptops with SSDs, I thought rather than just reformatting it, why not spoil my iMac with the same goodie that it clearly deserves? Read on to find out how the upgrade went.%Gallery-108375%
OCZ RevoDrive X2 PCIe SSD reviewed: blisteringly fast in every conceivable way
Hard to say why OCZ Technology pushed out revision two of its RevoDrive so soon after the original launched, but it's hard to complain with numbers like this. Just in time to shock the performance hound in your life with an outlandish Christmas gift comes the RevoDrive X2, and this here PCIe SSD solution has now been benchmarked to the hilt. The bottom line? It's fast. Really fast. In fact, Hot Hardware calls it "simply one of the fastest PCI Express based SSD solutions" that they have tested, noting that it went toe-to-toe with Fusion-io's ioXtreme while costing a good bit less. Critics over at Tweak Town echoed those thoughts, and while both teams felt the $680 asking price for a 240GB model was a touch pricey, neither felt that it wasn't worth it if you've got the coin laying around. Hit the links below for more charts than you'd ever want to see as an eight grader.
OCZ amps up performance on RevoDrive X2 PCIe SSD: 740MB/sec, up to 120k IOPS
Blink, and you've probably missed it. Just four short months after we saw OCZ Technology's original RevoDrive reviewed (and subsequently adored), along comes revision two. The RevoDrive X2 PCI-Express SSD looks, feels and smells the same as the first, but the performance is obviously looking north. The unit we saw introduced at Computex was capable of hitting 540MB/sec, while the X2 pushes that to 740MB/sec and up to 120,000 IOPS -- "nearly triple the throughput of other high-end SATA-based solutions." Furthermore, this guy packs double the SandForce SF-1200 controllers (four versus two in the original), and it retains the onboard RAID 0 design that you've come to know and love. It's available as we speak in 100GB to 960GB capacities, but there's nary a mention of price; something tells us that you're probably not the target market if you have to ask. %Gallery-106194%
MacBook Air upgrade kit bumps capacity to 256GB, turns old module into USB 3.0 SSD
Sure, the only remotely user-replaceable component on the 11.6-inch MacBook Air are those tiny Toshiba SSDs, but PhotoFast's got what might be one of the most elegant upgrade solutions we've ever seen. The Air USB 3 Adapter gives you not only a brand-spanking-new 256GB module with a Sandforce SF-1200 controller, but a speedy USB 3.0 flash drive too -- which smartly doubles as the mechanism by which you move your old files over, as you can just transfer everything through the USB port. Once you're done swapping modules, the company says you'll see a 30 percent speed boost over the original drive, with reported transfer rates of 250MB/s on both sequential reads and writes. Shame the Japanese company didn't specify any sort of estimated release date or price.
OCZ Ibis touts 2GBps High Speed Data Link, vanquishes SSD competition
What's after ludicrous speed? If you ask OCZ, the answer is HSDL speed, which is the company's new interface idea for bypassing the bandwidth limitations of standard SATA/SAS interconnects. Using a high-quality SAS cable to hook up its new Ibis drive to a PCI Express host card, OCZ has managed to deliver a cool 2GBps of total bandwidth -- that's one gigabyte up and one gigabyte down... every second. In order to feed this massive data pipe, the company's gone and stacked four SandForce SF-1200 controllers inside the Ibis and RAIDed them together for good measure too. The upshot isn't too dramatic for desktop applications, where'll you'll see performance that's merely world-beating -- reading at 373MBps and writing at 323MBps -- but if you throw in some deeper queues and enterprise-level workloads you'll be able to squeeze out 804MBps reads and 675MBps writes. Needless to say, the Ibis scooped up many a plaudit in early reviews, and though it may be expensive at $529 for 100GB, it still seems to represent good value for those who have the workloads to saturate its High Speed Data Link.
Corsair F120 SSD undressed, reviewed, compared to predecessor
We know you like SandForce's ludicrous speed SSD controllers, but how much do you know about these enterprise-class chips really? If your answer is anything short of "everything," you'll have to give Tech Report's writeup a read, where the guys get down and technical with Corsair's latest SandForce SF-1200-controlled drive, the F120 (above right). Differing from the F100 that came before it by cutting down overprovisioning (user-inaccessible storage space set aside to accelerate random writes and improve longevity) from 28 to 7 percent, this drive offers you an extra 20GB of room, but it does take a bit of a performance dint as well. If you must have the results in bitesize form, the F120 seemed better value (at $339) for netbook and desktop users than its elder, faster brother, though Indilinx-based competitors (such as Corsair's own Nova) were recommended as the sagest choice. We still advise, as always, that you wade into the source and give the full review a read.
Mushkin serves up its own SandForce SF-1200 controlled SSD: Callisto
That controversial SandForce SF-1200 controller sure has been poking its head out an awful lot lately, and yet again we're watching it steal the show in another new SSD. Mushkin, a mainstay in the high-end RAM industry, has just outed a new solid state drive meant to compete with those already splashing down from Intel, Corsair and OCZ Technology, and if the claims prove true, the Callisto could indeed be a serious contender. The outfit claims that users will see read speeds of up to 285MB/s and write speeds of up to 275MB/s, and the three-year warranty is definitely assuring. It's available to order today in 60GB, 120GB and 240GB capacities, with prices set at $219, $370 and $666 in order of mention. Go on -- you know that devil on your right shoulder was coaxing you into buying the biggest one, anyway.
OCZ's Agility 2 SSD reviewed: despite limits, SandForce SF-1200 drive performs well
Contrary to popular belief, one solid state drive isn't the same as another solid state drive necessarily. OCZ's new Agility 2 is proof of that, boasting the final (v3.0.5) version of SandForce's SF-1200 firmware. The issue here is that Corsair's recently released Force series of SSDs are shipping (and continue to ship) with v3.0.1 installed, which -- according to SandForce -- will never be viewed as the final version ready for mass consumption. As the story goes, v3.0.1 may experience a reliability issue with a power management state, but v3.0.5 caps small file random write performance as to better separate the SF-1200 drives from the pricier SF-1500 drives. Our compadres over at AnandTech were able to put the (factory limited) Agility 2 SSD through its paces, and for the most part, it came out looking pretty decent. Critics found 5- to 10-percent performance gains when compared to Intel / Indilinx offerings, but unless you have to have the absolute best, paying extra for that bump may not be the most intelligent move. The other point here is that while the Agility 2 may be capped with the v3.0.5 firmware, at least its upgrade path is a lot clearer than the aforementioned Force; if you ever take v3.0.1 away from that unit, you can kiss that extra performance goodbye. Hit the source link for the full, drama-filled look.
OCZ bids for solid state throne with new Vertex 2 and Agility 2 SSDs
For the past nine months, Intel's X25-M G2 has been the solid state drive to beat, and manufacture as it might, rival OCZ hasn't been able to mass produce a SSD capable of matching its fantastic all-around performance. The original Vertex 2 Pro might have done the trick, but the company scrapped it after the speedy SandForce SF-1500 controller was found wanting, and only 5,000 of the 270MB / sec, 15,000 IOPS drives were ever produced. But now, OCZ's back with SandForce's cheaper SF-1200 chip, and surprise of surprises, the drives it power are even faster -- at least on paper -- than before. The new Vertex 2 and Agility 2 SSDs boast maximum sequential read speeds of 285MB / sec and 275MB / sec writes, and can perform those all-important 4K random writes at up to 50,000 IOPS on a Vertex, or a very respectable 10,000 IOPS for the budget Agility line. The company expects both drives to ship in the next few weeks in usable capacities of 50GB, 100GB and 200GB (provisioning an extra 14GB of overhead for each 50GB of storage) with 400GB SSDs planned further down the road. Now then, OCZ, how about that price tag? Update: Though we believe Intel's X25-M G2 is still considered the front-runner in the consumer space, it is worth noting that OCZ's new SSDs still have catching up to do in order to match the superb numbers generated by the more expensive enthusiast drive, the Crucial RealSSD C300. We'll have to see which incumbent OCZ is actually competing with (if not both) when it announces price points. [Thanks, SSD!]
Corsair's 100GB Force SSD scorches the test bench with its blazing speed
The name's Force, SandForce. Corsair's making it kinda easy on us to spot its first SandForce-controlled SSD, and there's no reason it should be bashful about it, given that the SF-1500 is currently the fastest SSD processor around. The F100 in question has the SF-1200 onboard, offering a lesser 285MBps read and 275MBps writes (oh, such measly specs!), but that also means you might, might, actually find a way to afford one. The TweakTown crew took one for a spin recently and were happily surprised to find little in the way of performance difference between SandForce's supposedly enterprise-class SF-1500 and consumer-class SF-1200 -- both sped ahead of the Intel X25-M G2 and Indilinx Barefoot-controlled drives. The speed conclusion was clear cut, and with pricing for the 100GB F100 projected to be as low as $400, the value proposition doesn't look too bad either. The 200GB variant is expected to land somewhere around $700 when Corsair's Force SSDs make it out to retail in a few days' time.
