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Icy Dock is well known for their extensive line of drive adapters that solve dozens of issues around fitting x number of drives into y drive bay slots. The net result of each is that users maximize the number of drives their PC can hold. Icy Dock's latest iteration on this concept is the EZ-Fit Pro, which takes two 9.5mm 2.5" SSDs or hard drives and fits them into a 3.5" drive bracket.........read the full review
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Wednesday, February 29, 2012
MB082SP review - storagereview.com
Monday, February 27, 2012
ICY TIP: ICY DOCK MB982SP-1S - Professional SSD Converter for your Professional Mac Pro System
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Friday, February 24, 2012
Icy News: HGST With First 7,200rpm, 7mm, One-Disk, 2.5-Inch HDD, at 500GB
"6Gb SATA interface and 32MB cache
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has shipped more than 25 million Travelstar Z-series, 7mm z-height, 2.5-inch HDD, for thin and light portable computers, ultra-compact CE devices and industrial systems.
The company is now shipping its new 500GB, Travelstar Z7K500 drive - the industry's fastest and highest capacity, one-disk, 7,200 RPM HDD. All Hitachi GST Z-series drives can serve as a direct replacement for standard, 2.5-inch 9.5mm hard drives. They feature common connectors and mounting points for simple integration into existing systems, and enable design flexibility to differentiate and meet market demands for new thinner, lighter and more robust devices..." - via Storagenewsletter
The company is now shipping its new 500GB, Travelstar Z7K500 drive - the industry's fastest and highest capacity, one-disk, 7,200 RPM HDD. All Hitachi GST Z-series drives can serve as a direct replacement for standard, 2.5-inch 9.5mm hard drives. They feature common connectors and mounting points for simple integration into existing systems, and enable design flexibility to differentiate and meet market demands for new thinner, lighter and more robust devices..." - via Storagenewsletter
Hitachi is pushing the envelope with the currently fastest and highest capacity 7200RPM HDD. It is quite thin as well, the height at 7mm. The more interesting part is how this is used with the new ultrabooks that were shown off at this year's CES. By combining an HDD with SSD cache, allowing for faster I/O access times. This sort of design does have it's compromises which is the price. Producing and adding a fast cache memory for your HDD costs much more than just using a slower hard drive alone. With that in mind, the price for ultrabooks and memory such as this will cost more than your more bigger laptops. Will this type of design be worth a purchase? Let us know!
Monday, February 20, 2012
New Product Announcement – ICY DOCK MB082SP EZ-FIT PRO 2 x 2.5” SSD/HDD to 3.5” Full Metal Bracket
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Tuesday, February 07, 2012
Icy News: Intel 6Gb SATA SSD 520 Using 25nm Arriving
"With LSI SandForce controller, 480GB at $999 in Q1,000
Intel
Corporation announced its fastest, most robust client/consumer SSD,
the Solid-State Drive 520 Series, a 6 gigabit-per-second SATA
III SSD produced using Intel compute-quality 25-nanometer NAND memory process
technology.
Aimed at delivering performance for the PC enthusiasts, gamers, SMBs, the SSD 520 has throughput performance, new security features and reliability to meet the intensive user requirements.
Any consumer application requiring high throughput and bandwidth, low latencies and accelerated speed will benefit from the SSD 520. Software developers, architects, accountants, engineers, musicians, media creators and artists are just some of the professionals that will find that the SSD 520's package of features can make an impact on their productivity. With faster performance for graphic renderings, compiling, data transfers and system boot-ups, users can speed through multi-tasking or once-cumbersome application wait times with SSD 520 Series.
"We tapped Intel engineering to create a client SSD that delivers performance on all fronts with obsessively high reliability," said Rob Crooke, Intel vice president and general manager of the Intel Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group. "The Intel SSD 520 once again raises the industry bar on SSD performance, quality and reliability to dramatically improve user experience."
Unlike a traditional HDD with spinning disks and moveable parts, an SSD is based on silicon, NAND flash memory specifically, to create a lower power, more reliable and faster storage solution that can keep up with today's most demanding applications, Internet streaming and intense multi-tasking.
Based on its own 25nm Intel compute-quality NAND flash memory and a 6gbps SATA III interface, the SSD 520 uses an LSI SandForce Flash Storage Processor with an Intel co-defined and validated firmware release, to create an SSD that sets new industry performance benchmarks. It delivers up to 80,000 maximum 4K random write IOPS and up to 50,000 4K random read IOPS. Sequential read performance of up to 550MB/s and up to 520MB/s sequential writes also accelerate and improve user productivity. This is backed by thousands of hours of Intel testing and validation, including more than 5,000 individual tests.
"We worked closely with Intel to leverage their deep understanding of the NAND flash, ultimately providing a unique and optimized solution for client computing applications with the LSI SandForce Flash Storage Processor," said Michael Raam, vice president and general manager of LSI's Flash Components Division, formed by LSI's acquisition of SandForce. "Working through Intel's extensive validation process ensures the Intel 520 SSD will raise the bar in delivering top-tier performance and superior quality and reliability over the life of the drive."
The SSD 520 will mark the high end of its client SSD offerings and include these new features: a range of user capacities from 60GB to 480GB, AES 256 bit encryption capabilities and password protection for added security in the event of theft or power loss.
According to PCMark Vantage benchmarking, users of the SSD 520 may see productivity gains through an up to 78 percent boost in overall PC responsiveness, and gamers will see an up to 88 percent jump in performance to enhance their gaming experience. IT professionals will not only provide this additional performance and productivity to their customers/employees, but find that the Intel SSD 520 also delivers on reliability, improved security, smoother operations and lower total operational costs.
"Our game development workflow involves a combination of large batch process and aggressive interactive pre-visualization, all highly parallelized to the point that the storage performance becomes a major bottleneck," said John Carmack, founder and technical director of id Software, a gaming software developer and creators of Doom and Quake. "For many of our workloads, Intel SSDs have doubled throughput, and in some cases involving mapping tens of gigabytes of image data, we have seen an honest order of magnitude performance improvement, which is a rare and wonderful thing."
The SSD 520 Series is priced as follows, based on 1,000-unit quantities: 60GB for $149, 120GB at $229, 180GB at $369, 240GB at $509 and 480GB at $999.
It comes with a 5-year limited warranty." - via storagenewsletter.com
Aimed at delivering performance for the PC enthusiasts, gamers, SMBs, the SSD 520 has throughput performance, new security features and reliability to meet the intensive user requirements.
Any consumer application requiring high throughput and bandwidth, low latencies and accelerated speed will benefit from the SSD 520. Software developers, architects, accountants, engineers, musicians, media creators and artists are just some of the professionals that will find that the SSD 520's package of features can make an impact on their productivity. With faster performance for graphic renderings, compiling, data transfers and system boot-ups, users can speed through multi-tasking or once-cumbersome application wait times with SSD 520 Series.
"We tapped Intel engineering to create a client SSD that delivers performance on all fronts with obsessively high reliability," said Rob Crooke, Intel vice president and general manager of the Intel Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group. "The Intel SSD 520 once again raises the industry bar on SSD performance, quality and reliability to dramatically improve user experience."
Unlike a traditional HDD with spinning disks and moveable parts, an SSD is based on silicon, NAND flash memory specifically, to create a lower power, more reliable and faster storage solution that can keep up with today's most demanding applications, Internet streaming and intense multi-tasking.
Based on its own 25nm Intel compute-quality NAND flash memory and a 6gbps SATA III interface, the SSD 520 uses an LSI SandForce Flash Storage Processor with an Intel co-defined and validated firmware release, to create an SSD that sets new industry performance benchmarks. It delivers up to 80,000 maximum 4K random write IOPS and up to 50,000 4K random read IOPS. Sequential read performance of up to 550MB/s and up to 520MB/s sequential writes also accelerate and improve user productivity. This is backed by thousands of hours of Intel testing and validation, including more than 5,000 individual tests.
"We worked closely with Intel to leverage their deep understanding of the NAND flash, ultimately providing a unique and optimized solution for client computing applications with the LSI SandForce Flash Storage Processor," said Michael Raam, vice president and general manager of LSI's Flash Components Division, formed by LSI's acquisition of SandForce. "Working through Intel's extensive validation process ensures the Intel 520 SSD will raise the bar in delivering top-tier performance and superior quality and reliability over the life of the drive."
The SSD 520 will mark the high end of its client SSD offerings and include these new features: a range of user capacities from 60GB to 480GB, AES 256 bit encryption capabilities and password protection for added security in the event of theft or power loss.
According to PCMark Vantage benchmarking, users of the SSD 520 may see productivity gains through an up to 78 percent boost in overall PC responsiveness, and gamers will see an up to 88 percent jump in performance to enhance their gaming experience. IT professionals will not only provide this additional performance and productivity to their customers/employees, but find that the Intel SSD 520 also delivers on reliability, improved security, smoother operations and lower total operational costs.
"Our game development workflow involves a combination of large batch process and aggressive interactive pre-visualization, all highly parallelized to the point that the storage performance becomes a major bottleneck," said John Carmack, founder and technical director of id Software, a gaming software developer and creators of Doom and Quake. "For many of our workloads, Intel SSDs have doubled throughput, and in some cases involving mapping tens of gigabytes of image data, we have seen an honest order of magnitude performance improvement, which is a rare and wonderful thing."
The SSD 520 Series is priced as follows, based on 1,000-unit quantities: 60GB for $149, 120GB at $229, 180GB at $369, 240GB at $509 and 480GB at $999.
It comes with a 5-year limited warranty." - via storagenewsletter.com
Intel is always on the cutting edge of technology and their new 520 series is no different. Their new 520 series is offered in 60GB for $149, 120GB at $229, 180GB at $369, 240GB at $509 and 480GB at $999. Perfect for anyone wanting to make the switch to SSDS or a company making the major change over to flash memory. Let us know what you think about Intel's new SSD series.
Monday, February 06, 2012
Icy News: OCZ Nearly Doubling Random Write IO/s
"For Octane SATA 3.0 SSDs
OCZ Technology Group, Inc. announced the release of enhanced IOPS firmware (v1.13) for the Octane SATA 3.0 Series SSDs.
The random write performance has been improved, in some capacities over double that of the previous specifications, for users looking to push their SSD performance.
For all Octane SATA 6Gb/s models, the improved IOPS made possible by this new firmware allow for greater transactional performance, especially during small file and random access speeds in everyday computing applications.
When compared to the previous revision, random write IOPS performance doubles across nearly all capacities when tested in Iometer 2008:
Model/Old Random Write 4K IOPS (FW v1.12)/
New Random Write 4K IOPS (FW v1.13)
The random write performance has been improved, in some capacities over double that of the previous specifications, for users looking to push their SSD performance.
For all Octane SATA 6Gb/s models, the improved IOPS made possible by this new firmware allow for greater transactional performance, especially during small file and random access speeds in everyday computing applications.
When compared to the previous revision, random write IOPS performance doubles across nearly all capacities when tested in Iometer 2008:
Model/Old Random Write 4K IOPS (FW v1.12)/
New Random Write 4K IOPS (FW v1.13)
- Octane 128GB/7,700/18,000
- Octane 256GB/12,000/25,000
- Octane 512GB/16,000/26,000
The doubling in IOPS is not very surprising now (however, still very impressive), with the way the SSD market has been growing. What we would like to see is the capacity be researched to be increased in a cheap way. If you have the means to spend money on buying multiple SSD's to use as storage drives, then it's not a problem. But, the rest of the consumer world is waiting until this happens as it may be difficult to move SSD's because of the price.
Let us know what you think!
Friday, February 03, 2012
Icy News: Transcend SSD720 SATA 6.0Gb/s SSD Announced
"Transcend Information has announced the launch of its new, next generation SSD720 SATA III 6GB/s SSD. The SSD720 delivers significantly improved performance over standard rotating hard drives and its focus on productivity-enhancement is the ideal solution for demanding system applications, such as specialized multimedia computing and serious gaming...Built-in wear-levelling and Error Correction Code (ECC) help ensure reliable data transfer to further increase the lifespan of the SSD720. In addition, it fully supports the S.M.A.R.T. command, which helps detect possible hard drive failures before they occur." -via Storagereivew
It seems like every six months, a new generation of some technology comes by. The spec sheet of Transcend's new SSD seems to be pretty beefy to say the least. You add some of the newest technologies an, while making it backwards compatible is a great way to improve on a product. Even with all these great features, the price always still matters for most users. The age old question still remains: Will you buy now, or wait until the technology is even cheaper? Let us know what you think!
Thursday, February 02, 2012
Introducing the ICY DOCK Partner Kit Page
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Icy News: Seagate expects flood-related hard drive shortages to continue
" Seagate took some time out from its busy earnings reporting schedule to address supply concerns stemming from the recent devastating floods in
It has been a while since we have heard any updates on the hard drive flood shortage. It still seems that hard drive manufactures are still having trouble keeping up with the demand due to the shortage in parts. Seagate is going to fall 150 millions units short due to the floods this year. Let us know what you think about this shortage and if it has affected you in buying new hard drives.
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