Storage World

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 modules currently available. They’re backed by a lifetime warranty.

To reach 1,800MHz, however, you’ll need to overclock your motherboard’s front-side bus (FSB), and the rest of your system may not be able to reach fast-enough speeds to max out the memory’s performance. We reached 1,800MHz on an Asus P5K3 Deluxe motherboard, but on the Gigabyte P35C-D3SR we used for comparative testing, we could only push the FSB far enough for the memory to reach 1,740MHz.

The OCZ DDR3 memory showed a clear win in video editing. Our multi threaded MPEG-2 rendering test using Sony Vegas 7.0 dropped from 8 minutes and 18 seconds to 7 minutes and 22 seconds when we swapped in the DDR3 RAM. iTunes audio conversion saw a slight speedup, dropping from 6 minutes and 45 seconds to 6 minutes and 24 seconds. Most other applications, however, showed only negligible increases.

We did see speedups across the board in our tests, but only video rendering and similar memory-and-CPU intensive tasks are likely to make you feel like you’re getting enough bang for your buck, at the moment. Still, it’s clear that DDR3’s additional performance will make it the standard for performance oriented machines, once prices drop.

Click here to find out more: OCZ Platinum Dual Channel Kit – Memory – 2 GB ( 2 x 1 GB ) – DIMM 240-pin – DDR3 SDRAM – 1800 MHz / PC3-14400 – CL8 – 1.95 V – unbuffered

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. USB 3.0 ports and cabling will be designed with both copper and optical cable capabilities, so even higher speeds will be possible in the future.

Updates are also planned for the Wireless USB (WUSB) transfer format, which currently operates at the same 480-mbps speed as USB 2.0. A new WUSB 1.1 interconnect format will operate at speeds of up to 1 gbps.

Jeff Ravencraft , Intel’s technology strategist, cites increasing interest in digital music and high-definition video as the main reason for updating the USB standard. Th e group hopes to have a final specification ready by the middle of next year.

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 seem a little on the small side to some of you, but Odyssey’s cartridge technology is currently based on 2.5-inch mobile hard disks, which allows for a significantly more portable cartridge based design. The Odyssey’s hard drive cartridges are also built with durability in mind: They’re able to withstand a 900 g-force shock, although Imation doesn’t indicate whether this is during operation or when powered down.

Odyssey cartridges eject from the drive at the touch of the unit’s status button, which also flashes red or green to indicate power state, as well as access activity. In the tests, the Odyssey drive actually put up some very respectable performance numbers, at 18.6MBps and 14.6MBps for reads and writes, respectively. In a backup scenario, this equates to about 875MB per minute. Comparatively, one of our faster 8GB flash drives put up 14.3MBps for reads and 11.7MBps on writes over the same USB 2.0 port.

Bundled with EMC’s Retrospect backup software, the Odyssey 80GB unit lists for $299.99. When you consider there are other external USB drives on the market, such as WD’s 500GB My Book, it’s hard to justify the Odyssey’s cost. You do get a significantly more rugged and portable solution, but Imation simply has to work harder to get its pricing in line with the competition.

Via Odyssey 160G Remov HDD Storage

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 problem ol’ George prophesied for those of us firmly entrenched in the information age. The Corsair Flash Padlock USB drive will hold up to two gigs of your stuff and let you lock it down by entering a PIN on its integrated 5-button keypad. Of course, a flash drive with this capability will attract corporate and legal types, but casual users need quick, secure storage media, too.

With a built-in security processor, the Flash Padlock offers self-contained, hardware-based encryption for any PIN you enter into the drive. This technology is significantly more secure than preinstalled software-based encryption apps found on other flash drives, because it requires no interaction with the host computer or any software.

Operating the Flash Padlock is easy. If you don’t create a PIN, the drive operates and responds to the OS like any other flash drive. However, once you create a PIN, the drive isn’t even visible to the OS. To unlock the drive, simply enter your PIN, and the drive will be accessible for 15 seconds; once you plug it in, it will remain unlocked in the system indefinitely. When you remove the drive, it will lock itself again in 15 seconds. In the event you lose your PIN and lock yourself out of the drive, Corsair offers a Flash Padlock PIN registration service for free. Read/write performance was uninspiring, but pbviously that’s not the Flash Padlock’s focus. Want to secure that stuff? Corsair’s Flash Padlock has you covered.

Click here for more Corsair Flash Voyager USB 2.0 – USB flash drive – 2 GB ( CMFUSB2.0-2GB )

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 Premium.

In overall performance, this Pioneer falls between LG’s GGW-H20L and Sony’s BWU-100A, although it can’t burn BD-R/RE media like those drives. It trails the LG by about a minute in most tests except for DL DVD+R burns. However, it beats or meets the Sony in its turn, although the Sony is a somewhat daster DVD ripper.

The BDC-2202 can’t disguise the DVD+R/RW discs you burn as DVDROMs for increased compatibility, nor does it support LightScribe. It can run disc quality scans, however. It found very few faults with one of the Verbatim 4GB DVD-Rs it burned for me, awarding it a 99 (of 100) quality score in Nero CDDVD Speed. On the other hand, the drive heavily faulted the layer break in the DVD+R DL it had produced.

Pioneer includes a Vista-compatible Corel software bundle with (the formerly InterVideo) WinDVD 8 LE and Ulead’s VideoStudio 11 SE and Burn.Now SE applications.

Via Pioneer BDC-2202B5PK Blu-ray/DVD/CD Combo Drive (Black)

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. governmental officials with national security concerns, according to quotes from Hawkins. Despite the attention, Seagate managed to release new Maxtor OneTouch 4 drives in September, including a $359.99, 1TB Plus version.

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 16GB SDHC and 8GB mini-SDHC cards in October. Finally, Japanese manufacturer DTS has released details of its mCell cyperDrive, which combines an 80/120/160GB 2.5-inch SATA drive with a real-time OS, CPU, and 1GB DDR RAM, all residing in a 3.5-inch case. Transfer rates reportedly hit 110MBps.

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 MySQL support) servers; UPnP multimedia support; and backup and FTP server functionality. However, probably the most universally appealing features would be the CS407’s iTunes server and Photo Station 2 functionality. All of these run on Synology’s Linux based operating system that is easily accessible from any Web browser. The unit is powered by a Marvell 5281 500MHz processor with 128MB of RAM and 4MB of onboard flash. Frankly, the unit was a little rough around the edges, with a simple sheet metal rack and no hot-swap capability for the drives.

Setting up the unit was amazingly simple. I installed the included Synology Assistant software and within a few clicks had a RAID 1 installation of two 750GB Western Digital hard drives initialized with the volume created. From there, I created a network share and granted privilege rights to specific users for access on my network.

The CS407 transferred a 1.75GB file from my test workstation to the network share in 3:08 (minutes:seconds) over its Gigabit connection with an 8.70MBps maximum transfer rate. It copied the same data back to my workstation in 2:52, with the transfer rate topping out at 9.35MBps. All told, I really liked the Synology CS407 for its simplicity of use and DIY-style NAS. Retailing at $600 without drives installed, it’s a bit on the pricey side, but its features and performance are top-notch.

Via Synology CubeStation CS407 – NAS – Serial ATA-300 – RAID 0, 1, 5 – Gigabit Ethernet

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. As such, it isn’t much of a surprise that WD recently released its monster 750GB and 1TB models to the market some time after rivals Seagate and Hitachi.

I recently put WD’s 7,200rpm, 750GB WD7500AAKS drive through the test gauntlet and was pleasantly surprised with WD’s perpendicular rendition of the super-large desktop drive. The drive was extremely quiet—barely audible inside a standard chassis. On the other hand, heat is definitely a concern for high-density drives like the WD7500AAKS, so make sure your case has proper airflow.

Performance-wise, the WD7500AAKS put up a great showing, besting Seagate’s 750GB drive, as well as Hitachi’s popular Deskstar 7K500 drive in every yest scenario. In fact, the WD7500AAKS’ HD Tach average read and write times (82.5MBps and 76.1MBps, respectively) were surprisingly faster than WD’s coveted 10,000rpm Raptor WD1500 drive. Only its random access time, 13.6ms, fell short of eclipsing the Raptor, which posted 8.1ms.

One word of caution: This drive doesn’t include a 4-pin Molex power connector. Other than that, this is one enormously drive with performance that’s hard to beat.

Via Western Digital WD2500KS Caviar SE16 250GB SATA 7200Rpm 16MB Cache SATA Hard Drive

Tags: Memory, hard disk