Otaku Gadgets

Here’s one for the professionals out there who need extremely high speed storage. Crucial has started shipping its C300 SSD’s. These are 2.5″ SSD’s and hence meant for those who want to swap out HDD’s from their laptops and put in fast SSD’s instead. These C300 drives have a read speed of up to 355MBps and they come it sizes of 128GB and 256GB.

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Toshiba has bumped up its SSD offerings that are based on the NAND chip based. They now have 128GB Solid State Drives that come in mSATA and half-slim formats. The standard versions have sequential write speeds of up to 70MBps and sequential read speeds of up to 180MBps. These new SSD modules are 1/8 as heavy and take up 1/7 the space of a standard 2.5″ SSD. These SSDs might be expensive but they will come in real handy for newer, smaller portable computing devices that need high performance and a small footprint. These modules belong to the standard line called ‘SG’ series SSDs. Toshiba will also launch ‘HG’ Series SSDs.

Continue reading “Speed Up Your Netbook With A 128GB SSD From Toshiba” »

The transition from offering USB 2.0 storage devices to USB 3.0 devices is in full swing right now. Yesterday we mentioned that Western Digital is already offering the Western Digital My Book 3.0 HBA, an external USB 3.0 hard drive in their US store and today Seagate was unveiling the Seagate Black Armor PS110 USB 3.0 Hard Drive at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The Seagate Black Armor PS110 USB 3.0 7200RPM 2.5–inch Hard Drive comes with 500 Megabytes of storage space, full USB 3.0 support and a PC express card to bring USB 3.0 compatibility to laptops. The USB 3.0 hard drive has been primarily designed for laptops and other mobile devices.

Today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Seagate (NASDAQ:STX), the worldwide leader in hard drives and storage solutions, unveiled the BlackArmor® PS110 USB 3.0 portable external hard drive performance kit for notebook computers. Demonstrating its industry leadership in delivering advanced and easy-to-use storage solutions, this all-in-one USB 3.0 toolkit packages a 500GB 7200RPM 2.5–inch portable hard drive, power cable and PC express card, to deliver real-world, proven speeds up to three times faster than its USB 2.0 predecessor, making it one of the fastest portable hard drives available. USB 3.0 speed has been specified at 4.8 Gbs per second or a ten times improvement over USB 2.0, however this is theoretical performance, and the new Seagate BlackArmor USB 3.0 portable drive achieves 3X performance over USB 2.0 in real world testing.

The BlackArmor PS110 USB 3.0 performance kit contains everything you need to upgrade your laptop to take advantage of USB 3.0 speeds. The new BlackArmor PS 110 USB 3.0 Performance kit is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 and can be purchased immediately from Seagate.com for a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $179.99.

The transition from USB 2.0 powered devices to USB 3.0 will most likely be fast and fluent thanks to the backwards compatibility of the USB 3.0 standard and the manufacturers who are offering kits that consist of a USB 3.0 device and an adapter or card to upgrade the PC with the functionality.

The USB 3.0 standard is the successor of USB 2.0. It introduces several new features of which the most prominent one is the so called SuperSpeed bus which is capable of a raw throughput of 4 Gbit/s and real-life speeds of up to 400 Mbyte per second which is a lot faster than the 480 Mbit per second that USB 2.0 offers.

SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface – Accelerate your data transfers with the fastest available interface. Transfer a 24 GB HD movie in 2.7 minutes vs. 11.3 minutes with a 2.0 connection.

* Your performance may vary based on your system configuration. HD movie size approximates a 2 hour movie. 2000 MP3 files assumes a file size of 5MB or total. Transfer speeds were achieved on a system with 64-bit Windows 7, Intel quad core 2.67 GHz, X58/ICHIOR on an ASUS P6T Professional motherboard.

USB 3.0 is a new technology which means that there are not many hardware devices that make use of it yet. Even worse is the fact that PCs also need to support USB 3.0 to make use of the higher speeds and other advantages of USB 3.0. It is possible to connect USB 3.0 devices to USB 2.0 but the advantages will be nullified by this.

Western Digital is one of the first companies to offer a USB 3.0 external hard drive that is offered with and without an USB 3.0 adapter. The Western Digital My Book 3.0 HBA retails for $199 without the USB 3.0 adapter which, according to Gizmodo, is offered for an additional $20 which would be a fair price for the adapter. According to their information a My Book 3.0 HBA 2 Terabyte version is in the making which will be available shortly. No pricing information has been revealed however on this one.

Additional information about the product are available at the Western Digital website.

There is no dearth of pocket sized data storage devices in the market and most of them use USB or eSATA interface to transfer data across computers. The Verbatim Insight is a newly launched external data storage device that offers some additional and useful features for the users. It has a unique ‘always on’ screen that notifies the users about the available free space on the device. Therefore, the users can understand how much data can be crammed in the drive without even plugging it in a PC’s USB port. It looks stylish and offers excellent data read and write speeds as well. The drive is available in two capacities- 320 GB and 500GB.

Continue reading “Verbatim Adds Insight, A Feature Rich External Storage Device To Its Product Portfolio” »

As operating systems and software have become more space consuming and resource hungry with time, the need for secured and easy data backup has increased among people. There is a plethora of external hard drives in the market today that offer the users the way to store their data and backup the contents of the computer’s hard drive in a convenient way. These drives are available in varying storage capacities and with time they are becoming faster and more feature packed than ever. Hitachi is among the leading data storage device manufacturers and its hard disks are used in a majority of the desktop and laptop computers worldwide.

Continue reading “Hitachi SimpleTough External HDD : Designed To Survive Abuse And Accidents” »

Intel has been making the headlines for various reasons ever since this year’s IDF happened. The things showed off at the annual event have the industry still buzzing with the various developments around them. Of course, that is what Intel had hoped for. Moblin has been on and off the news for the past week or two thanks to Dell and others. Light Peak on the other hand has been getting a lot of attention due to the Apple connection. Intel has come in to the focus once again but in a rather indirect manner after NVIDIA announced that they are ‘postponing’ the development of new chipsets. Read all about it on the other side.

Continue reading “Intel In The News: Chipset Wars, Moblin Plans and Light Peak Leaks” »

To overcome the problems associated with flash cards and hard drives that were originally designed for personal computer applications and consumer electronics, a breakthrough in advanced storage technology has been engineered with the so called Silicon Drives. Silicon Drive III represents the industry’s very first advanced storage technology. It also comes with integrated PowerArmor and SiSMART technologies. The technology involved has been field proven in thousands of customer applications so far.

In March 2009 WD acquired Silicon systems and began shipping its new silicon drive III SSD product family which was actually based on technology developed by Silicon systems. These Silicon Drives are perfect replacement for hard drives used in data processing centers, blade servers and also in industrial and embedded systems apart from places where forward looking and high performance, reliable storage solutions are required. The other features like high transfer rates and capacities of Silicon Drive III enable operation for new multimedia applications involving high data volumes. Also due to the high reliability and the long lifetime of Silicon Drive III flash storage solutions, digital streaming applications like Video on Demand or VOD, Internet Protocol Television or IPTV and digital monitoring, control systems have been able to benefit a lot. Continue reading “Silicon Drive III” »

The 2 TB model of the MyBook world edition II comes with two 1 TB Green edition hard drives, formatted in mirrored, redundant RAID1. There is an advantage of RAID1 over using the 2 drives as single volume, as it helps keeps a complete copy of data and ensure the data is safe and secure in case a hard drive does fail. The main advantage of World edition II is that it offers small and medium business disaster recover which is cheap and simple. In case of disasters, the world edition II swaps the dead drive with a new drive and automatically rebuilds the live drive onto the backup drive, thus make a complete disaster recovery solution.

The new version world edition II network storage device comes with new features and a design with less heat emission due to green line of western digital hard drives and has less power consumption as compared with world edition. The initial process for set up and configuration hardly takes 10 minutes and all you need is the CD with your computer for configuring the device. For windows based computers you can install two applications namely WD Discovery client application and the other one which is available for both windows and OSX is WD Backup application.

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DDR3 SDRAM in electronic engineering terms stands for double-data-rate three synchronous dynamic random access memory. This random access memory interface technology is used by computer or other digital electronic devices for high bandwidth storage of working data. One of the many dynamic random access memory (DRAM) implementations DDR3 is part of the SDRAM family of technologies. The DDR3 SDRAM is quite a significant improvement over its predecessor, the DDR2 SDRAM and its primary benefit is its ability to transfer the data at almost double the rate at which DDR2 (I/O is at 8 times the data rate of the contained memory cells) does, thereby enabling a much improved and higher bus rates and peak rates then the earlier memory technologies. However there is no noticeable reduction in latency which is a feature of the DRAM array and not due to the interface. Also the DDR3 enables a maximum module size of 16 gigabytes with chip capacities of 512 megabits and 8 gigabits. A point to note is that the DDR3 is only a DRAM interface specification, whereas the actual DRAM arrays that stores the data are similar to any other type of DRAM along with similar performance.

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