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The Solo from ioSafe is an external hard drive that is designed to keep your data safe in case of a disaster – especially fire and flood. This product comes in four capacities: 500 GB, 1 TB, 1.5 TB, and 2 TB. We set the 500 GB on fire for 30 minutes and then dropped gallons of water on it. Let’s see if it survived!

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The Mushkin Callisto 60GB SSD proved to be a great drive and it is the first Sandforce SF-1200 drive with mass production firmware with 13% over-provisioning that I have had the pleasure to benchmark and use. I found the performance of the Mushkin Callisto with firmware version 3.0.9 was not the same same as OCZ’s exclusive SF-1200 firmware used on the Vertex 2 series. This is because the Sandforce Mass Production (MP) firmware limits small file random write performance on all SF-1200 drives except for the Vertex 2 in accordance with SandForce’s agreement with OCZ. This is why reading reviews is critical before buying an SSD…

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While SSDs are still a fairly new technology, it has certainly come a long way in the last couple of years. The choices in SSDs are increasing and the prices are also decreasing making it possible to own one without a second mortgage. Though SSDs are getting cheaper, they still aren’t cheap, with larger ones still hitting some heavy figures. But even a smaller drive can make your system faster and INTEL has responded with the introduction of their 40GB Value Performance X25-V SATA Solid-State Drive (SSD).

One of the methods that people have used to get the best of both worlds with SSDs is by purchasing a smaller and cheaper SSD to use as a boot drive. By installing the OS onto the drive, you get the blazing fast start up times that SSDs are known for while packing all your other files or large programs onto a hard drive. INTEL has recognized this type of usage and have answered with their new X25-V that we’ll be checking out for you today. Let’s find out how this drive performs against other boot drive worthy competitors.
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If you’re looking for something much more versatile than a regular external hard drive, you might want to consider paying the premium to invest in some network attached storage. While buying a NAS and the necessary hard drives will be more expensive, the increased versatility and functionality are worth it. With the price of network attached storage devices as well as large hard drives coming down in price in the last couple years, the uptake of such devices have grown dramatically.

While there are many high end offerings, one of the more recent budget-minded offerings is the Synology DS210j. Despite its lower price, it still comes with all the power that usually accompanies the Synology name.

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Bluray has started taking over the market since late 2009 and more and more Bluray products have entered the market. Asus has kept up with the demand and released an external Bluray player/writer for computers. We are going to test this new model out and see what we can get out of it both noise and quality wise.

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Guaranteed you are not getting less in quality but performance. But is the number so different to not consider either. Well we have to the Solid 2 in house today to ready it s run on the test bench. The Solid 2 comes in three different sizes: 30GB, 60GB and 120GB. Each of which consist of the Indilinx Barefoot. Each has its own specifications when it comes to read and write performance. And in the case of the 60GB model we are looking at today has 200/120MBs respectively. And yes it supports TRIM.

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One of the many questions that people may ask is ‘Should I sacrifice storage capacity for performance?’. With the mechanical drives getting so cheap and the storage capacity getting insanely large, sacrificing TB of storage for the expensive, yet high performance, SSD can be a hard decision.

A quick search online and you can find that various vendors have launched a budget oriented SSDs that is targeted toward consumer users who wish to have the performance of SSD without breaking their bank account. Granted, SSDs are still quite expensive compare to traditional hard drives in terms of gigabytes per dollar ratio. They are nonetheless getting cheaper but are still not yet at the price that everyone who wishes to have one can afford.

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The new AH328 flash drive from Apacer has a nice metallic-like design, it is decorated with four screw-cap carvings and does feature a retractable USB connector. In terms of performance it has mediocre performances, but for transferring small files its more than enough.

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The OCZ Vertex 2 is an ideal successor to the original Vertex series as it has proven to be one of the fastest SSDs that we have ever seen here at Legit Reviews. It was able to give the Intel X25-M G2 160GB SSD and Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB drives a run for their money in many of the benchmarks. We were able to reach read speeds of up to 280MB/sec. and write speeds of up to 238MB/sec in ATTO on the Vertex 2. We have been benchmarking SandForce controllers now for several months and they appear to be very strong and have so far proven to be one of the contenders in the SSD controller market. In fact, it is no wonder that Corsair, Patriot, Super Talent and other SSD companies have followed OCZ’s lead and begun using the SandForce controller in their own SSDs.

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Back in the mid ’90s, the state of external devices was a mess. Everything had its own proprietary connection, and you were sharply limited on how many devices you could plug in to one computer at a time. One keyboard, one mouse, one modem and one printer, unless you went to great and unusual lengths. External hard drives were only available through the expensive and finicky SCSI interface, and so saw little use outside of corporate and university settings. Plug-and-play was still a marketing myth, in these days of Windows 95 and the Pentium Pro. To remedy this deplorable state, a group of six prominent computer companies were just taking the wraps off of a new standard that promised to unify all these various functions into a single bus.

That standard was dubbed the Universal Serial Bus, or USB, and while it didn’t really catch on until 1998, it has since transformed the landscape of computer peripherals. Keyboards, mice, printers, scanners, all came to use a common interface, with all having full hotplug support, and many requiring no special drivers beyond what the OS could supply. Alongside these older devices, a host of brand new devices such as web cams, flash drives and portable music players began to flourish. Today, the thought of a PC with no USB ports is a strange one, and for many power users, nothing less than a dozen ports will suffice.

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