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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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.

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.

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.