The constant swapping of USB memory sticks and optical drives is one way to totally frustrate users, of course sharing PC drives over a network isn’t exactly energy friendly either. There is of course the simple solution.

Synology’s DiskStation DS210j Network Attached Storage allows you to serve up files on your network and should be at a low enough price point where most anyone can jump into the NAS game. Testseek Labs has the review:

There are also the options to make updates of the software, reset to factory defaults, install external modules like an e-mail server, web statistics server and there’s even a small phpMyAdmin module which means you can install MySql and run this unit as a small web server with a database.

Extending it beyond mere file serving is sure to excite the tweakers out there.

Technologies tend to incorporate certain safety mechanisms in order to keep things working properly but as time goes on those early additions tend to spiral out of control and may require tweaking from time to time.

Western Digital Advanced Format Technology, found in the WD10EARS, attempts to improve on drive performance while removing a good chunk of the overhead required to keep a hard drive in tip-top shape. HotHardware has the review:

Western Digital isn’t lying about the efficiency benefits of a 4K sector drive, but the company can use that space in a number of ways. Smaller platters are one option, larger storage capacity is another, and removing the innermost tracks of the platter is a third. This last contains an extra bonus—because read and write speeds are typically reported as an average, knocking off the slowest tracks would make the hard drive look  faster in a benchmark without actually changing performance at all. For now, WD isn’t claiming that Advanced Format delivers any particular advantage and AF drives aren’t carrying much of a premium, if any.

They may not claim any performance benefit but a “green” drive keeping up with the company’s performance model is impressive indeed.

Everyone’s fascination with creating hybrid versions of this and that is a bit frustrating but, when implemented correctly, some of the designs do have some performance merits. Yes we’re talking about PC gear.

The SilverStone HDDBoost Hybrid accepts your standard 3.5″ hard drive and, through software trickery, augments your drive’s performance using a bit of flash storage space it has on board. Hardware Canucks has the review:

The uses for the HDDBoost both start and stop with one undeniable truth: the price of modern, larger capacity SSDs puts them far outside the reach of most consumers. Naturally, prices are falling extremely fast but many times you will have to sacrifice storage capacity for the performance afforded by these high-end drives. However, with this product from Silverstone you are able to have the best of both worlds: the capacity of a hard drive and the fast load times normally associated with an SSD. This should be especially interesting if you want a painless system upgrade with seamless plug and play functionality. Most of the time you won’t even realize the HDDBoost is running other than the suddenly eye-opening speed at which Windows boots or programs load.

A sweet and inexpensive upgrade which should make your system speedier.

The PC building norm is to keep your storage drives inside your computer’s case with all of the other hardware that use it which is a bit of a problem if you’re storage hungry and your current case doesn’t allow for much expansion space.

Sans Digital’s TowerRAID TR5UT(-B) is capable of RAIDing up to 5 hard drives and hooks up to your PC through USB or eSATA connections. TechwareLabs has the review:

The Sans Digital TR5UT(-B) has as its name implies the capability to house up to 5 drives for a total capacity of 10TB of storage space. This tremendous amount of storage is accompanied in the TR5UT(-B) package by a PCIe 2.0 eSATA 6Gbps controller card. The card our unit came with was actually a Highpoint controller so you are getting top notch products instead of a no name or re-branded card.

Impressive performance and although NAS functionality would be nice the price tag will no doubt shoot up quite a bit higher.

A large percentage of users ignore the general maintenance that a PC requires  most notably a proper defragmenting run on their harddrive. There hasn’t been much testing done on its effects…until now.

Overclockers.com has tested the effects of file fragmentation on disk performance and tested a number of defragmenting applications on their system. Surprising results do occur:

With the results of the tests in, it seems the ‘old wive’s tale’ of defragmenting your HDD to maintain performance is not only true, the results of it were astounding.  Even if you don’t use a 3rd party defragger, the tool built into Windows itself gives a massive boost in performance.

Interesting results indeed, and a gentle reminder to run your defragmenter today.

Kingston has been on a it of a roll lately and their latest launch is no different. The company has released a 16GB MicroSDHC Class 10 expansion card which should handle a good chunk of your data storage needs.

As far as speed is concerned you’re looking at a minimum transfer rate of at least 10MB/s which should allow for decent recording and image capturing speeds.

You’ll want to be prepared though as the card will set you back $138USD MSRP. You can also pick up versions of the card packed in with a single SD adapter or miniSD and SD adapters for $139USD and $140USD respectively.

USB 3.0 has all of the makings of a must-have feature going forward mostly for its insane transfer speeds which enable a wide variety of improved gadgets to get a much needed improvement.

The Seagate BlackArmor PS110 USB 3.0 External Drive brings an interesting, and fast, feature set to your notebook computer with its very own USB 3.0 ExpressCard included in the package. Bjorn3D has the review:

Just how much faster is the drive than our previous USB 2.0 backup method? Well, on USB 2.0 it took 6 to 7 hours to back up the lab’s laptop. Needless to say, backups weren’t getting done in a timely manner. The first time we backed-up with the Seagate BlackArmor, it took 33 minutes flat. In that amount of time, we can take a short lunch break and have a complete backup of the most vital laptop we use in our day to day operation. That’s piece of mind and an increase in productivity. You can’t put a price on that.

Speedy and time-saving, what more could you ask for?

SATA 6Gbps support is one of those features enthusiasts have been clamoring for yet its shelf life is likely to be quite short. Storage interfaces rarely meet their full potential before another faster standard is released, thankfully at least one company is pushing their products into using SATA 600 before it goes away completely.

The Micron Crucial RealSSD-C300 SSD is one of the first solid state drives to support SATA 600 and offers speeds above those limited by the SATA 300 interface. Benchmark Reviews has a look:

The Crucial RealSSD-C300 offered up to 383/227 MBps read and writes speeds in ATTO Disk Benchmark trailed by 363/226 MBps in Crystal DiskMark, while Everest reported a 332/215 MBps linear bandwidth speed. Input/Output performance was modest in Iometer and HD-Tune, indicating that the MTFDDAC256MAG-1G1 model would perform extremely well for enthusiast consumers but not offer the high operational functionality needed in the Enterprise server sector.

An extremely fast drive when paired up with the faster interface. Hopefully more manufacturers take the lead.

Solid State Drive performance depends on quite a few factors but the biggest tends to be the controller driving all of the individual memory chips. A good controller is needed in order to keep data moving for the best possible performance.

Benchmark Reviews has a look at the Toshiba T6UG1XBG Solid State Drive Controller found in the Kingston SSDNow V SNV325 drive:

The Toshiba T6UG1XBG processor used in this architecture article was taken from the 3rd generation Kingston SSDNow V+ Solid State Drive. This is the same control board used in the recently announced Toshiba HG2-series SSD (THNS512GG8BBAA), and both share firmware version AGYA0201 with identical NAND construction. The Toshiba T6UG1XBG SSD controller is a 43nm part with native TRIM support, and offers a maximum rated read speed of 230MBps and write-to performance peaking at 180MBps.

Quite nice but some controllers able to max out SATA 6G would be nice.

It’s readily apparent that Solid State Drives outperform the age-old spindle-based solutions by insanely wide margins and, as time goes on, the performance gap is only going to get larger while they come down in price.

The G.Skill Falcon II 128GB SSD offer blazing performance and can even outrun some of its SSD based competition. TechSpot has the review:

The G.Skill Falcon II 128GB is about 15% cheaper than the Crucial M225 at the same capacity level, and 10% cheaper than the OCZ Agility 120GB. It is also 42% cheaper than the Intel X25-M G2 160GB and 22% more expensive than the 80GB version, though on a per-gigabyte basis the G.Skill Falcon II comes out as the more affordable option. In fact, as it stands now the Falcon II seems to be the cheapest way to get your hands on an Indilinx-based SSD.

Speedy and economical, is there a better combination of traits?