t-break: Tech @ Its Fastest » Storage Devices

OCZ RevoDrive 3 120GB SSD Review

Taimoor Hafeez — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:04:03 +0000

While PC enthusiasts go gaga over the latest consumer grade SATA III SSDs, when it comes to bleeding edge performance there is another type of SSD that is in a different league all together. PCIe drives reign supreme when it comes to SSD performance, as they are not limited by the bandwidth capacity of SATA III (6Gbps). Today I’ll be looking at the OCZ RevoDrive 3 PCIe 120GB SSD.

Given the price and form factor of the RevoDrive 3, it’s clear that this is an enterprise level SSD. Still, there are many enthusiasts and professionals working on high-end machines that will find the RevoDrive 3 right up their alley.

The basic anatomy of the RevoDrive 3 isn’t so far off from a regular SSD, but some tweaks give it the beastly performance OCZ claims it to have. First off there’s the SAS 6Gbps to PCIe 2.0 x4 bridge that provides full 2Gbps bandwidth compared to 750Mbps through SATA III.

The SAS chipset is said to be from Marvell with custom drivers, allowing TRIM support, SMART data readouts and firmware update through the SSD Toolbox. OCZ calls it the SuperScale storage accelerator with the new Virtualized Controller Architecture 2.0 (VCA 2.0). This basically allows the processor to send real-time I/O commands simultaneously to the two SandForce 2281 controllers.

Furthermore, the sixteen 8GB NAND chips would have given a total of 128GB of storage, but actual usable space is limited to 111GB (rated is 120GB). The extra space allows for better garbage collection, which coupled with the VCA 2.0 allows OCZ to claim that data integrity is near 100%. Time will tell if this claim holds true, though.

Before we move onto the benchmarks, let’s take a look at the packaging. Coming in a rather large box, the RevoDrive 3 comes in a rather solid box. Packed inside the safe cushions is the RevoDrive 3 itself, with the drivers CD as well.

Installation is simply plugging the RevoDrive 3 into any PCIe 2.0 or 3.0 slot you have on your motherboard, and downloading the drivers directly from OCZ. Without the drivers Windows 7 won’t recognize the drive, nor will it be bootable if you’re planning to install Windows 7 on it.

Western Digital ready for hybrid drives?

Taimoor Hafeez — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 06:22:53 +0000

Western Digital announced their 2nd quarter 2012 results, with sales of $2bn, compared to $2,5bn from a year earlier. The mere 20% decrease in sales is quite remarkable considering how badly WD’s manufacturing plants were hit during last year’s Thailand floods. In fact, WD did indeed ship almost half the hard drives shipped in the same period last year, with 28.5 million drives in Q2 2012 compared to 52.2 million drives in Q2 2011. Despite this, increase in prices and gross profit margins lead to profits of $145m, compared to $225m last year.

While discussing these earnings call, WD’s CEO, John F. Coyne was asked about ultrabooks and what medium storage will be used in them, given the heavy push from Intel and other OEMs. “I expect ultrabooks to have both hard drives, traditional hard drives and hybrid hard drives and SSDs. So I think there will be, depending on the specific version of ultrabook, you will see all 3 solutions and even in certain models, choices between those solutions in the same model, ” said Coyne (via transcript at Seeking Alpha).

“And we think that the SSD penetration profile will be in very low single digits in a mature ultrabook environment. And then we see an emerging position for hybrids a little early to develop a view on exactly what percentage of penetration, but we see hybrids as a very compelling alternative on the performance side to solid state on bang for the buck. And we anticipate that in large capacity environments, traditional hard drives will continue to be the compelling solution.”

One of the biggest reasons we don’t find Seagate’s Momentus XT in many notebooks as a default, or even optional HDD is because Seagate is the only manufacturer making hybrid drives; nobody else in the industry is making them. The critical mass for hybrid drives hasn’t been achieved simply because there is only one supplier in the market. With WD entering the foray of hybrid drives, the landscape for traditional hard drives could change very soon.

You can check out our review of the latest Momentus XT drive to see how fast it is compared to traditional HDDs vs SSDs.

Seagate Momentus XT 750GB Review

Taimoor Hafeez — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:29:53 +0000

The Seagate Momentus XT hybrid hard drives are one of those special drives that many people desire, but haven’t had much experience with. They’re like VelociRaptors, just the name sounds cool enough to want one. But it’s the promise of high performance for relatively low cost that attracts everyone. In the case of the Momentus XT, the low costs are relative to Solid State Drives, which are still prohibitively expensive for many.

So today I’ll be looking at the second generation Momentus XT hybrid drive that promises more capacity, more performance and better reliability than the first generation drives. Unfortunately this performance and capacity increase also comes at a cost of $100 (AED 370) extra.

As you can see, the NAND Flash that’s used to cache frequently used data has doubled to 8GB from the original Momentus XT. The obvious benefit here is that larger capacity for cache means that more of your programs will be running at maximum capacity (of near SSD speeds) most of the time.

Despite the size increase, though, it seems that the Momentus XT still won’t be able to achieve its maximum potential. The reason is that Seagate doesn’t allow any data to be written on the 8GB NAND while in use; only read. Essentially that means that read heavy applications, such as iTunes or any video game will see a lot of benefit as data is mostly read. For those who’ll be working on heavy editing applications, such as Photoshop or Sony Vegas, will still be bound by the write speeds of a 7200rpm drive, albeit at SATA III speeds.

I guess if both real-time read and write access was given to the NAND Flash, perhaps a bigger size would be needed. So these limitations seem more in line with keeping the costs down, rather than technical issues. That said, Seagate has mentioned that they will be releasing a firmware upgrade for these 2^nd generation Momentus XT drives that will, in fact, allow data to be written to the 8GB NAND. So far we haven’t had anything, so this review looks at performance you’ll be getting from units straight of the packaging.

One of the key features of the Momentus XT is the ‘Adaptive Memory Technology’ that’s basically a self-learning algorithm that notice your most used programs and stores their data on the cache. So every time you run those programs again, they will be loaded as quickly as an SSD since the data is being read directly from the 8GB NAND Flash.

Seagate launches 2nd gen Momentus XT Hybrid Drives in Dubai

Taimoor Hafeez — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:51:16 +0000

At their press event today, Seagate officially launched their second generation Momentus XT hybrid drive. Technically the drives are already available to retail partners being sold as standalone OEM drives. Soon, though, major electronic street retailers such as Jumbo, Sharaf DG, Emax, etc. will be selling packaged retail version of the new Momentus XT.

The 2nd generation hybrid drives improve on the original Momentus XT in three key areas as far as impact on performance is concerned. Firstly, they will have increased capacity from 500GB to 750GB. The NAND Flash also gets a bump from 4GB to 8GB. And finally the new Fast Boot algorithm allows for a smarter and faster learning process resulting in regularly used data being loaded almost as quick as an SSD.

At the event we had a chance to quickly catch up with Mr. Sofocles Socratous, who is the Sales Director for Turkey, Greece and the MEA region.

When asked about whether we will be seeing the Momentus XT hybrid format in 3.5″ form factors, he said that as per their roadmap, in the next 5 years 80% of Seagate’s drives will be hybrid hard drives, so a 3.5″ hybrid drive is definitely in the works.

Another question was why don’t other hard drive manufacturers also make hybrid hard drives. According to Mr. Socratous Seagate has made a lot of investments in this segment. He probably means R&D costs in developing a hybrid hard drive. Now that the acquisition of Samsung’s hard drive division is complete, Seagate expects to make further roadways into developing better hybrid drives as their understanding of working with SSDs deepens even further, not to mention the benefits of having low cost NAND Flash directly from Samsung. It’s just not as easy as it looks to develop a hybrid drive, so other companies haven’t been able to provide a hybrid solution yet. That said, Mr. Socratous believes we’ll be seeing hybrid drives from other hard drive manufacturers just a few short years.

Our final question was focused on the improvements of the second generation Momentus XT compared to the original hybrid hard drive. Specifically people complained that the 4GB of NAND Flash got filled up pretty quickly, and users were reporting slowdowns from near-SSD speeds to regular 7,200 rpm HDD speeds within months.

To tackle this issue, Segate has come up with a better learning algorithm, which also works by writing boot files directly onto the NAND Flash for instantaneous access to keep Windows boot times fast. Furthermore, doubling the NAND Flash to 8GB means that there will be ample space for regularly used programs to cache data, resulting in an always efficient hybrid drive.

Check out our review in the coming days as we put Seagate’s claims to the test and thoroughly test the new Seagate Momentus XT 750GB hybrid hard drive.

WD My Passport for Mac Hard Drive Quicklook

Abbas Jaffar Ali — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 04:38:51 +0000

Portable hard drives have become the quint-essential accessory for a notebook user and with newer notebooks coming in with smaller but faster SSD drivers, the requirement for a large capacity drive to put your media and backups on is higher than ever. We take a look a quick look at one such product today- the WD My PassPort for Mac.

What makes this drive “for Mac” is the fact that it comes pre-formatted with HFS+ which is the native file system used by Macs. This means that you can pretty much plug this drive in any of the newer Macs and use it right away for reading and writing files as well as creating backups with Time Machine. Let me point out that any portable hard drive is capable of this but most of them come formatted with FAT32 or NTFS and need to be reformatted by your Mac to HFS+ which is just an extra step.

The other thing that makes this WD drive “for Mac” is, obviously, the design. It’s almost a pre-requisite for any Mac product to look good and My Passport does well but not necessarily great in this aspect. I like the minimal design but the plastic enclosure isn’t very Mac like. Also, I found the drive to be a tad bit chunky- especially when put next to the MacBook Air. However, this has more to do with the current level of technology than anything else. If you want something slimmer, you will have to settle for lower capacity for now.

My Passport for Mac has a pretty clean design with just one USB port and an LED next to it. WD bundles a USB cable with the drive along with warranty information. On the drive, WD bundles two applications that you can install on your Mac. WD Drive Utilities lets monitor the status of your hard drive using SMART as well as run diagnostics and quick tests along with erasing the drive. WD Security on the other hand password protects your hard drive. An update to both these utilities was available for download when I initially launched them which is good as it tells you that WD is keeping stuff up to date.

There’s not really much else that can be said about USB 2.0 portable drives. Their performance has been saturated by the speed of the USB 2.0 port and that holds true for My Passport for Mac as well which posted speeds of just under 40 MB/s in both read and write tests. While this is good enough for general reading and writing of files, expect to wait a while if you plan on moving high-definition movies to and from this drive. Initial Time Machine backup will also take a while but subsequent ones should be fast.

Priced at around AED 800, the WD My Passport for Mac is quite a bit on the pricey side- something Mac users are accustomed to. While it offers a decent design and plenty of storage, I see no reason why you cannot get one of the other, cheaper USB 2.0 alternatives even if it isn’t for the Mac and just format it in HFS+ and use it like this drive. The added utilities bundled with the drive don’t really add much value and can be found around the web for free.

Kingmax 120GB SATA III SSD Review

Taimoor Hafeez — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 05:40:15 +0000

Last week I looked at the Kingmax SATA II 128GB SSD, and while I was happy with the drive in general, my only complaint was that it should have arrived in the market a year earlier. With the SATA III version, Kingmax has finally entered the arena of the big boys. Rated at up to 550Mbps read and 520Mbps write speeds, I’ll be putting Kingmax’s claims to the test.

Like the SATA II version, the SATA III drive comes in the same gorgeous form factor and slim size. The brushed aluminum black casing with a 7mm height on this 2.5” size just never gets old. You’ll notice on the cover it says ‘SMP32 Client’ denoting it as a consumer grade SSD. Capacities for these go all the way up to 2 TB, although that size hasn’t been released yet. With TRIM support and RAID compatibility, the Kingmax SATA III 120GB SSD is as good as anything from the competition. So let’s see how it fares.

Unlike the SATA II drive that was mostly intended for laptops, the SATA III version comes with a 3.5” bracket and screws. There’s also a SATA data cable to connect to your motherboard, plus a SATA power cable with a molex connector on the other end. Also, a small manual to that shows the installation process.

Kingmax 128GB SATA II SSD Review

Taimoor Hafeez — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:54:00 +0000

Kingmax Technology has made a name for themselves in the PC memory market, especially with their Nano Gaming RAM modules. While the company is also known for its memory cards, they recently announced their entrance into the SSD market.

Today I’ll be looking at the Kingmax 128GB KM21 SATA II SSD. Yes, they have also entered the market with the 120GB SMP35 SATA III SSD, but today I’ll be looking at the slightly more affordable model first. Keep in mind that SATA III motherboards have yet to penetrate the global PC market. Laptops in particular are using SATA II based boards, although many new high-end laptops do support SATA III.

Still, with the KM21 SATA II drives, Kingmax is primarily targeting the laptop market, especially given its ultra-low profile, measuring just 100 x 70 x 7 mm. That height of 7mm is particularly noteworthy as most standard 2.5” drives are around the 9.5mm mark. This means that the Kingmax KM21 SSD should easily fit in any slim laptop, even the new ultrabooks; making it an ideal and cheap hard drive upgrade.

Now the KM21 SSD seems to be made of thin sheets of brushed aluminum, or some other metal with a matt black finish. The standard holes are in place to secure the SSD in any 2.5” or 3.5” mount. The rainbow colored holographic stickers on the top and bottom of the drive give it a very subtle touch of colors. Overall the KM21 SSD looks very beautiful, if such a term can be applied to hard drives. The low profile and black metal finish gives it a very subtle look, like it’s ready for operations in the Batcave!

Seagate and WD reducing hard drive warranty periods

Taimoor Hafeez — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 13:15:33 +0000

Over the weekends both Western Digital and Seagate announced that they will be reducing the warranty periods on specific hard drive models from next year onward.

First off, Western Digital has said that from 2nd January 2012, all Caviar Green, Caviar Blue and Scorpio Blue drives will have their warranty reduced from 3 to 2 years. Caviar Black and Scorpio Black, along with VelociRaptors will continue to have the existing 5 years warranty period.

Obviously there will be a time int he next couple of months where the market will have the Caviar Green, Blue and Scorpio Blue with both 3 and 2 year warranty periods. If you want to confirm the warranty period on your drive, just check out WD’s support page.

Meanwhile Seagate has also told retail partners that warranty on many of their hard drives will also carry reduced warranties. From 31st December 2011, most of the hard drives that carried 5 years warranty has been reduced to 3, and those with 3 years down to 2 and in some cases 1 year only.

The Seagate Barracuda XT, Momentus XT and Constellation 2 drives will all now carry 3 years warranty instead of 5. The Pipeline HD series has 2 years of warranty and the Barracuda, Barracuda Green and Momentus drives will now carry 1 year of warranty instead of 3.

We have contacted both Western Digital and Seagate to get confirmation on whether these reduced warranties apply to the Middle Market as well or not, and will update the article as soon as we get confirmation.

Hard Drive shortages will cost Intel $1bn

Taimoor Hafeez — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 09:02:14 +0000

The Hard Drive shortages caused by the flooding in Thailand has hit the entire PC industry, and very few manufacturers have escaped unscathed. And a big company like Intel is no exception to the norm.

In a press release issued earlier today, Intel has stated that they have revised their fourth quarter revenue results in light of how hard the PC industry is hit by the hard drive shortages. As such, their new revenue for Q4 is expected to be $13.7 billion (plus or minus $300 million), down from the original estimates of $14.7 billion (plus or minus $500 million).

Even so, they expect the hard drive shortages to continue well into the first quarter of 2012, with the supply chain easing around the first half of 2012 and things returning to normal by then.

“The company expects hard disk drive supply shortages to continue into the first quarter, followed by a rebuilding of microprocessor inventories as supplies of hard disk drives recover during the first half of 2012.”

Compact Flash Association introduces the new XQD Memory Card

Taimoor Hafeez — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 08:18:05 +0000

Fragmenting a market with new standards is never a good idea, unless technology has moved so far up that you need to keep up. While DSLR cameras are getting worldwide acceptance by regular folks, not just photography enthusiasts, the megapixel game takes a new turn when picture sizes start to becomes ridiculously huge.

So targeted squarely at professional photographers, the Compact Flash Association announced the new standard in memory cards: XQD. These new cards cards are smaller than the aging Compact Flash cards, but bigger than the current SD cards. These new XQD cards are supposedly more rugged than SD cards as well. However, what makes their existence a necessity is the bandwidth of 2.5Gbps. By using the PCI Express interface, these new XQD memory cards are more like first-gen SSDs, with transfer speeds of 125MB/s up to 250MB/s. That equates to almost fifteen to thirty 20-megapixel photos per second!

The XQD cards will be first shown in February 2012 in a trade show in Japan, with full on licensing available to camera manufacturers from then on. Even so, don’t expect XQD camera to be available even in prosumer cameras any time soon. Perhaps another 2 years before XQD becomes the norm in professional cameras, and another 2 to 3 years before it filters down to mainstream DSLRs. Of course, that’s assuming that some other SD card manufacturer doesn’t come up with a even faster transfer speeds than XQD first!