Storage World

OCZ DDR3 PC3-14400 Platinum Edition

DDR3 is the third generation of double-data-rate (DDR) memory, promising record speeds and a host of improvements over the now-ubiquitous DDR2. While it’s true that the hottest DDR3 modules are reaching hypersonic speeds, their prices are currently stratospheric. The OCZ’s DDR3 PC3-14400 Platinum Edition includes two 1GB DDR3 modules that are guaranteed to run at up to 1,800MHz. OCZ’s heat-sink-equipped modules have a latency rating of 8-8-8-27, which is better than many slower 1,333MHz modul...

USB 3.0 Will Offer a 10X Speed Boost Over USB 2.0

Intel and a group of companies including HP, Microsoft, NEC, and Texas Instruments have begun developing the successor to USB 2.0. The third generation of USB will transfer data at speeds of up to 4.8 gigabits per second, ten times faster than USB 2.0’s 480-megabits-per-second transfer rate. The new standard will be backward-compatible with existing USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 devices. According to Intel, the USB 3.0 specification will be designed for low power consumption and improved efficiency. US...

Imation Odyssey Removable Hard Disk Storage System

Imation has been in the storage and media business since the beginning of dirt. From CD-R media, to tape backup, flash thumb drives, and removable hard drives, there are few removable storage technologies Imation hasn’t dabbled in. We recently spent some time with Imation’s latest release in the USB hard drive market, a cartridge-based system called Odyssey. The unit tested was configured with an 80GB cartridge, and Imation currently offers capacities ranging from 40 to 250GB. This might se...

Corsair Flash Padlock 2GB

How many times have you lent a USB flash drive to a friend or business colleague and wondered to yourself: “Wow, I hope there’s nothing on there that I don’t want seen.” Now, this probably wasn’t because you necessarily had anything incriminating on there, but more likely it was just the feeling that you were giving someone else access to, in the immortal words of George Carlin, “your stuff.” Let’s face it people, sometimes you simply have to lock up your stuff. Corsair has an answer to this ...

Pioneer BDC-2202

Pioneer’s new BDC-2202 is a DVD/CD burner with modest specs and the key ability to read BD movies and data discs. It costs less than a BD burner or a BD write/HD DVD read combo drive but nearly twice as much as Microsoft’s playback-only external HD DVD drive for the Xbox 360. A VC1 and an MPEG-4 AVC BD movie both looked and sounded great on the Pioneer. My test system had a Core 2 Duo E6700, 2GB of 1,066MHz DDR2, a Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card, CyberLink PowerDVD 7.3 Ultra, and Vista Home ...

Seagate Is Not For Sales Yet

Gateway may have its price, as we learned in late August when Acer bought the cow hided company for a reported $700-plus million, but Seagate isn’t on the selling block, says CEO Bill Watkins, despite rumored interest from Chinese, Korean, and Japanese companies in obtaining ownership of the U.S. hard drive maker. Although the buying and selling of tech companies has become somewhat back-page news in recent years, the interest by a Chinese company in buying Seagate got the attention of U.S. gove...

Toshiba Notebook Drives Now Bench Press 320GB and More

If you’re a big-time notebook user, you have to be big-time happy with news of Toshiba’s new MK-52GSX 2.5-inch SATA notebook drive, which maxes out at a bigtime and world-best 320GB. The two-plattered giant runs at 5,400rpm and sports an 8MB buffer and 12ms average seek time. Expect production to start yet this year. Elsewhere, Toshiba also recently took memory card storage to unprecedented heights with a new 32GB SDHC card. Although that capacity won’t be ready until January, expect new 16G...

Synology CS407

There are many NAS products hitting the market now; we recently took a look at Synology’s DS207, a tiny two drive capable box that packed a ton of features and performance. The CS407 is a big brother follow-up to the DS207 that has an internal rack; can house four drives; and supports RAID 0, 1, and 5 configurations. About the size of an average two-slice toaster, the CS407 is capable of supporting 3TB of total drive capacity. The unit comes with built-in file, printer, and Web (with PHP and ...

Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS

Hard drive manufacturers have recently broken the 1TB barrier with the help of the latest innovations in perpendicular drive recording technology. Western Digital isn’t known for being a trailblazer in terms of drive manufacturing. However, the company is definitely known for taking a one-up manship approach to product introductions, often letting others lead the curve in terms of the latest technologies and later providing product differentiation through advancements in performance and features...