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OWC offers 480GB SSD upgrade for Retina MacBook Pro, requires screwdriver and careful math
Order up a Retina MacBook Pro and you'll likely be confronted with a gravelly message about how the SSD is "built into the computer" and not user-upgradeable. As it turns out, that's not quite true -- so long as you're prepared to ignore a whole bunch of other warnings written inside the chassis itself, iFixit has shown how to remove the factory drive and now OWC has a new SSD to replace it with. The only downside is the cost: at $580, OWC's 480GB Mercury Aura Pro is actually more expensive than Apple's official 512GB upgrade. In an effort to sweeten the deal, OWC is offering those who buy before September 30th a compact USB 3.0 enclosure to make use of the freed-up drive. Alternatively, you may want to wait for prices to drop or for OWC to offer an even bigger capacity with better cost / benefits.
Plextor M5 Pro bulges SSD envelope with 94K IOPS and 540MB/s
Plextor's newly launched M5 Pro is angling to be the top dot on the SATA III SSD spec charts -- and looks like it will mostly succeed. The Marvell Monet controller lets the unit hit a continuous 540 MB/s read and 450 MB/s write speeds for the larger models, as well as a hefty 94,000 read and 86,000 write IOPS. Those figures would put it ahead of or alongside most of its competitors except in steady write speeds, but Plextor claims that hustle is not the model's only trick. It also makes use of "True Speed" tech to minimize performance drops with age, uses 128-bit error correction to eliminate data inaccuracy and offers 256-bit full-drive encryption. The 128GB, 256GB or 512GB drives will be available mid-August for prices that have yet to be determined, but it's likely to be well north of its budget namesake, the M5S. You'll find the full PR after the break.
Crucial outs v4 SSD for solid-state storage on a budget
Solid-state drives cost just a fraction of what they did a few years ago, but with prices that can still exceed $1,000, you could hardly label them as cheap. Crucial still aims to put solid-state storage within reach of those on a budget, however, releasing its 2.5-inch v4 drive with pricing that starts at $50. That entry-level model will net you just 32 gigs of storage -- hardly a lust-worthy sum -- but the series is also available in configurations of 64GB ($70), 128GB ($100) and 256GB ($190), offering read speeds of up to 230 MB/s and write speeds of up to 190 MB/s with SATA 2-capable desktops and laptops. The v4 joins Crucial's higher-end m4, which offers much speedier performance and Ultrabook-friendly configurations to boot. You'll find full details in the PR after the break.
Samsung Series 9 13-inch lands 1.9GHz Core i7, 256GB SSD edition for the power user set
When we looked at the 13-inch Samsung Series 9, we lamented that there was only one version on offer: if anyone wanted more than a Core i5 and a 128GB drive, their dreams were crushed. Samsung must feel that there's hope for us yet, as there's now a higher-end spec that slots in a 1.9GHz Core i7 and doubles the storage to 256GB. That's good news to us, even if the 4GB RAM ceiling will still have some avid Ultrabook fans turning elsewhere. Springing for the new flagship will set shoppers back by about $300 more than the previous top of the line, or $1,700 -- still pricey relative to the competition, but much more palatable you're searching for a premium Windows 7 ultraportable and aren't willing to budge on screen size.
Crucial ships mSATA-based m4 SSD upgrade, your Ultrabook never felt better
Crucial has already managed to stuff its m4 SSD into Ultrabook sizes, but the 7mm thick design may still be too portly for the thinner laptops in the pack. With that in mind, the flash memory guru has just started shipping the m4 mSATA, a barebones card that sits cozily next to the motherboard either as a cache for a rotating disk or as a main drive. It's still as speedy as many of its bigger cousins, with read speeds of up to 500MB/s per second. We suspect most buyers will be lured in by the low prices: at just $53 for a cache-friendly 32GB SSD and no more than $226 for a 256GB example, it's entirely feasible to give that spinning-drive Ultrabook a shot in the arm.
Intel pumps SSD 330 capacity up to 240GB, trims other drives' prices to match
If you haven't already dropped a solid-state drive into your computer, Intel just gave you a not-so-subtle nudge in that direction. Its entry-level SSD 320 has jumped in capacity from 180GB to 240GB, saving a few diñeiros for anyone who would rather not leap to the SSD 520 just to land a primary system drive. Either end of the price spectrum is also becoming a little more reasonable: the official reseller pricing has been slashed on the 320, 330 and 520 lines, even if Intel hasn't said by how much just yet. Intel's changes should be in immediate effect for those among us who just can't endure spinning storage one moment longer.
Plextor M5S SSD coming mid-July: healthy speeds starting at $99 for 64GB
The SSD market has finally reached the point where we can afford to be picky, but the M5S's blend of price and performance make it worth a look. It claims random reads / writes of up to 73k and 70k IOPS respectively, supported by Plextor's True Speed technology to deliver consistent rates even as the drive fills up, along with price tags of $99 for 64GB, $160 for 128GB and $299 for 256GB. The M5S has already been given the once-over by The SSD Review, which found nothing much to criticize other than the lack of a five-year warranty (as seen on the MS3) and overall gave it hearty recommendation -- check the More Coverage link for the full review.
Origin PC wants to put you 'in the fast lane' with back-to-school promo, hands you a free SSD
You know how some philosophical folks say that great things always come in pairs? Well, as it turns out, sometimes that is indeed the case. Not content with handing its fans a free trip towards the promised Ivy Bridge land, Origin PC's kicking off its 2012 back-to-school promotion with a couple of solid-state goodies to help you save some time during your every-day computer activities. The deal is quite simple: shell out some cash on one of the outfit's qualifying machines and you've got yourself a gratis 128GB or 256GB SSD -- this, naturally, includes the EON11-S, EON15-S, EON17-S and that beastly GENESIS, just to mention a few. As Origin PC points out, the worldwide deal's limited to one per customer, can't be combined with any other offer and it'll run until there's no more supplies to give. If all that sounds good, then head over to the company's site to get in on it, as well as check out the full list of units involved in the BTS promo.
Corsair's Force GS SSD series offer its best speeds in its biggest capacities
If you liked the look of Corsair's Force GT family of SSDs, but were after a little more space, the Force GS models might fit the bill -- with some Sandforce-beating performance improvements along for the ride. The SSD sizes start from 180GB, reaching the capacious heights of 480GB, and each offers SATA 6 Gb/s connectivity. The SSDs tote a sequential read speed of up to 555 MB/s, while it tops out at 530 MB/s during writing. The 2.5-inch drives will all arrive with an adapter for 3.5-inch cubbies in tow, while you can expect to pay between $190 to $490 -- depending on your storage needs.
OWC Mercury Aura Bundles let you replace your MacBook Air's SSD, use it as external storage
Got a Macbook Air from 2010 or 2011 and want to upgrade the storage without dropping its pre-existing SSD module all together? Well, you're in luck, thanks to OWC's new Mecury Aura Bundles. After upgrading your Air with one of the company's Mercury Aura Pro Express SSDs, the included Mercury Aura Envoy lets you re-purpose the factory SSD as a bus-powered, USB 3.0-compatible external drive. Better yet, the Envoy is made of aluminum, matches the Air's tapered design and weighs just 1.5 ounces. Owners of the 2010 Air can opt for a 180, 240 or 480GB 3Gb/s drive, while those with the 2011 model can bump up to 6Gb/s bus speeds with the same storage allotments and a 120GB option. Pricing for the bundle starts at $200 for the 120GB variant, maxing out at a hefty $780 and $800 if you want to move up to the spacious 480GB offerings. Thankfully, like the SSDs, the Mercury Aura Envoy is available as a stand-alone enclosure, and it'll cost you just under $50 bucks. Hit up the press release after the break for the full details if this dual-drive setup piques your interest
Ideum unveils speedy Platform and Pro multi-touch tables, says PixelSense ain't got nothin' (video)
Who knew giant multi-touch tables would trigger the next big speed race? Ideum clearly thinks that the PixelSense-based Samsung SUR40 is lagging with that AMD Athlon II X2, because it just rolled out a pair of speed demon 55-inch, 40-point touch surfaces (but not Surfaces) in the Platform and Pro. The Platform has a respectable dual 2.2GHz Core i7 and 8GB of RAM, but it also carries a pair of 256GB solid-state drives in case that museum exhibit app won't load quickly enough. Hopping to the Pro switches to two not quite as speedy 500GB hard drives in standard trim. It more than makes up for this with a quad 3.4GHz Core i7 and NVIDIA's Quadro 600 for the truly stressful projects -- the combination can juggle multiple users and tasks even more smoothly than its MT55 Pro ancestor. Outside of raw speed, picking a table depends mostly on svelteness versus expansion: the Pro has a full-fledged HP tower inside that can drop in SSDs and other upgrades you might fancy, while the Platform is half as thick as a SUR40 (at two inches) and sleeker overall than its big brother. We're working to get price quotes, but the early five-digit figures we've seen in the past likely rule out upgrading the family coffee table. You can convince yourself with a video after the break.
Seagate and DensBits team up on solid-state drives for the home, call truce in the HDD versus SSD war
It's an understatement to say that Seagate started off on the wrong foot in its attitude towards solid-state drives: the company only slowly came around to embracing flash memory, and then mostly for the enterprise crowd and hybrid drive lovers. A newly-struck partnership between Seagate and controller maker DensBits is signalling a more serious attempt to offer SSDs to everyday users. Along with catering to the business folk, Seagate wants its new teammate's help on building "low-cost, high-performance" consumer SSDs. Most of the drives for the plebeians will use slower but denser 3-bits-per-cell memory made on a process under 20 nanometers, while the suits will get faster 2-bits-per-cell flash for their servers. The deal doesn't have any timetable attached, although Seagate's decision to pour equity cash into DensBits suggests it's not just a one-time fling.
Falling SSD prices might give you a swift boot (up) sooner than you think
Solid state drives are the one piece of gear that can turn a dog computer into a cheetah, and it looks like you may not have to scrape much longer to get one. Floods in Thailand made prices for their spinning-plattered brethren climb, but many SSD models like those from Crucial, OCZ and Intel have fallen up to 65 percent in the last year. Lower NAND prices, along with cheaper and better controllers from Sandforce and Indilinx have no doubt contributed to the boon for performance-hungry consumers. All of that means that a 256 GB drive which cost $500+ in June 2011, now runs less than $200 -- and at $.82 / GB, it turns from a near-luxury good to at least a thinkable proposition for many.
RunCore rolls out Pro VI SSD for Ultrabooks in need of a jolt
Not to be left out of the Computex party, RunCore has just unveiled a 7mm-thick Pro VI solid-state drive to give new Ultrabooks a swift kick. The company is aiming squarely at the sunnier side of mid-range SSDs through a speedy JMicron controller that hits 550MB/s in reads, and a less aggressive but still brisk 380MB/s for writes. The SATA 6Gbps drive doesn't have any special tricks up its sleeves, but there's no doubt that it fits just about any ultrabook category: capacities swing from a very modest 32GB to a 512GB drive meant to take over from ho-hum spinning disks. While RunCore's customer list isn't public material, we wouldn't be surprised if a lot of extra-thin notebooks wending their way out of southeast Asia this year carry the Pro VI inside.
Samsung adds a little Ghost Recon to your 830 series SSD purchase
Need a bit more incentive to pick up one of those shiny new 830 series solid state drives from Samsung? Great news, storage enthusiast: Sammy's tossing a little Tom Clancy your way. The company will be including a download code for a full copy of Ghost Recon: Future Soldier in the boxes of 128-, 256- and 512GB models of the 830 series. The deal is good in the US and Canada -- for a limited time, naturally. The promotion begins today.
Agility 4 SSD from OCZ announced, already in stock at $150
SSD makers often try to wow us with raw MB/S, but OCZ is talking up "enterprise-level" reliability, ops per second, and throughput equally with its new SATA III 6Gbps Agility 4. The 64GB / 128GB / 256GB / 512GB drives -- with Marvell-built Indilinx Everest 2 controllers -- have middling max read/write throughput of 400 MB/s and 48,000 IOPS / 85,000 IOPS, respectively. But with Indilinx Ndurance 2.0 technology and no data compression, they claim that the NAND memory will last "well beyond" the manufacturer's specs -- without backing that up with actual figures. Prices seem steep at Amazon next to the competition, but could drop when they hit the streets in volume. So, if you're after an all-rounder instead of a sprinter, check the PR after the break.
Corsair Force GT SSDs put through their paces, have graphs to prove it
Instead of singling out one of Corsair's latest SandForce-equipped SSDs, the folks at StorageReview sussed out performance differences by putting each drive through the wringer. Though read / write specs are relatively uniform across the line, barring some slight dips in speed, they dug up a few juicy morsels of info that could benefit both frugal and performance-minded shoppers. In a read intensive gaming test, the 60GB entry drive performed similarly to the 480GB behemoth. Another notable result was a 60% jump in throughput between the 120GB and 180GB models. Keen on eking out the most performance-bang for your buck? Hop over to the source for the full skinny and a bevy of charts.
Microsoft details Windows 8's pre-boot world, helps you skip the F8 F8 F8 routine
Microsoft has been going into very exacting detail as to how Windows 8 works, but one area it hasn't explored much is what happens before you even see the Start screen. As user experience manager Chris Clark notes, the days of mashing F8 repeatedly to reach a pre-boot configuration are (mostly) over: you can invoke it either through an "advanced startup" in settings, through Start menu shortcuts or, if your PC is truly sick, let it show automatically. At least on systems blessed with UEFI instead of an aging BIOS, you'll get a lot more to tinker with as well, including going straight to the command prompt, recovering from a system image or booting from external storage. The emphasis on choosing your environment before you hit the power button is virtually necessary. A Windows 8 PC with a solid-state drive leaves just a 200-millisecond slice of time for any user input, and Microsoft would rather not have users caught in an infinite loop of restarting their systems as they unsuccessfully try to boot from USB drives. You'll likely discover the pre-boot space first-hand when the OS ships later this year, but for now you can check the source for more.
Samsung Chromebox gets a premature outing, $330 price tag (video)
Samsung has been almost completely silent regarding its Chromebox since its CES outing, so we were taken aback when we were tipped off that it was hiding in plain sight on TigerDirect's web store. Sure enough, a product listing provides a lot more detail about the tiny Chrome OS desktop than Samsung gave us in January, including its use of a 1.9GHz, dual-core Celeron B840, 4GB of DDR3 memory, a 16GB solid-state drive and six (not five) USB ports. We haven't seen mention of the promised wireless keyboard and mouse bundle, although the retailer's configuration might reflect a stripped-down trim level: at $330, it's a lot less than the $400 we were quoted at the start of the year. We wouldn't count on the store listing staying up -- at least, not until Google I/O -- but you can get a whirlwind tour of the Chromebox's core features through the hilariously awkward video below, which strips out the price if you're not watching from TigerDirect itself. [Thanks, Pete]
RunCore InVincible SSD wipes data away with the click of a button
This one goes out to all the Bonds in the world. RunCore, a Chinese company specializing in the production of solid state drives, has cooked up a SATA II solution that should satisfy even the most guarded of privacy fanatics. Living up to its grandiose InVincible moniker, this aptly-named SSD's built to endure extreme temperatures ranging from -45 to 95 degrees Celsius (or -49 to 203 degrees Fahrenheit), read / write data at speeds up to 240Mbps / 140Mbps and protect your 1s and 0s from prying, less-than-reputable eyes. How so? Well, the drive's actual pièce de espionnite aiguë (that's fancy for paranoiac fail safe) incorporates a dual-button scheme for clearing away data. Users, much like Neo in ye 'ole Matrix, will have two colored choices to make: select the green button for "intelligent elimination" (aka overwriting of data) or opt for the "less subtle method" offered by the red button which applies a current to the NAND flash memory for actual physical destruction of your data. So, whether you're a high-ranking government official, a spy unlike us or just someone who can't help but look over his / her shoulder, rest assured your secrets can now be safely disposed of. Jump past the break to check out the outfit's informational video and its woefully out of sync audio track.
