When, last year, the price of decent SSD drives veered towards £1-a-gigabyte, I decided this was no longer the enviable domain of the hot-rodder. Concerns about data integrity were enough to keep me hesitant. But finally, I took the plunge. It was a revelation.
Currently an upgrade for most laptops, SSDs are destined to become standard issue
In twenty years of trying to eke a bit of extra performance from my machines, nothing has made quite such a dramatic difference, although there have been some reasonable performance boosts along the way.
I’m often called out to fix something, and for the last 15 years it’s been fairly easy to fix somebody’s ailing machine. If it’s on fire, grab a damp tea towel. If it’s clicking, they need a new hard disk. For the rest of the time, adding a bit of memory to a grinding system has usually made the difference between torture and comfort, and been doable on the cheap. Read the rest of this entry »
Kit of the Year Solid-state drives have yet to truly challenge magnetic media when it comes to storage capacity and the price you pay for it. But 2009 saw a bumper crop of SSDs as Flash and storage specialists really tried to drive performance.
Some even pushed low capacity but cheap drives in a bid not to replace the HDD but to work alongside it…
Kingston SSD Now V 40GB
Kingston has delivered a disguised Intel X25-M that will transform your PC for a trivial amount of cash. The 40GB SSD Now V delivers on read performance and that’s exactly what you need when you’re starting Windows or loading an application off the disk and into memory. Provided punters can handle the discipline of uninstalling unwanted application and games, we predict that the Kingston will make massive inroads into the Desktop market. Read the rest of this entry »
Group Test Anyone else remember how the death of the floppy disk was supposed to mean the end of the ‘sneakernet’ – files exchanged physically on a handy, portable storage format?
It never happened. Instead, floppies were briefly replaced by higher-capacity media like Iomega’s Zip disk and then, when USB really took off, Flash drives. Nowadays, Flash drives are so ubiquitous you can pick low-capacity ones up for nowt at trade fairs.
Flash for Freedom: L-R Corsair Voyager 128, Patriot Xporter XT, Sony Click Excellence, Lexar Lightning and Kingston DataTraveler
The freebies might do for some folk, but plenty of us prefer something rather faster than oh-so-slow giveaways. USB 2.0 helped a lot, but there’s still room for improvement, and drive makers are pushing ever faster drives. USB 3.0 will change the game, but it’ll be a while before compatible Flash drives arrive – let alone low-cost ones.
We asked the main Flash key makers to lend us their fastest drives. We’ve focused on speed, but we’ve factored in portability, solidity and price when we came to choose our Recommended and Editors’ Choice products.
The drive sequential and random read and write speeds were tested using CrystalDiskMark 2.2 running on a Windows XP Service Pack 3 machine. The drives were set not to use Windows’ disk cacheing. Read the rest of this entry »
