Category: Hard Drives

The Plextor M5M mSATA solid state drive has the other competing brands beat in terms of performance for its value. It comes equipped with Marvell’s 88SS9187 controller and 19nm toggle-mode NAND from Toshiba. This little drive is a thing of beauty. Intel’s SSD 525 is the closest match in terms of M5M’s performance, but the price for one is hard to justify when you have something available such as the M5M. It’s a great upgrade for ultrabooks, tablet PC’s, and other systems with JEDEC MO-300 form factors.

Check out Anandtech for an in depth review, plus benchmarks!

Plextor M5M Specifications

A Biwin CPA25MS1210-032 32GB MLC PATA 2.5-Inch Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) could be the next best solution to achieve a performance boost in your IT equipment. This can save you from doing a complete overhaul of your system. Advancements and improvements of solid state drive technology has pushed SSDs so far ahead of traditional spinning hard drives that the read, write, transfer, and access time performances of SSDs have doubled, tripled, and/or even almost quadrupled the speed of traditional hard drives. We have seen SSD access times reach up to 100X faster than traditional hard drives. Solid state drives have now taken the spotlight in the IT market, pushing aside traditional spinning hard drives.

Speed

The Biwin CPA25MS1210-032 solid state drive is PATA / IDE compatible, perfect for older IT hardware that don’t come with the SATA interface. It’s the perfect solution for those of you seeking better performance and those of you who want to avoid the hassle of locating and spending extra money on the SATA-to-PATA converter solutions in the market. The Biwin CPA25MS1210-032 comes with 32GB of storage space. It’s the perfect size to store your operating system and all your essential applications. In doing so, computer boot times and application loading times will see a significant decrease. Some users report that their IT systems boot under 10 seconds or less, that’s lightning fast compared to users with traditional hard drives that can see their boot times degrade overtime as more data is stored to a 1 minute or longer.

Reliability

The Biwin CPA25MS1210-032 SSD is an Industrial Grade solid state drive, meaning this SSD has higher quality NAND memory with high rated endurance. The write endurance for this model is rated at >8years @ ( half of total capacity ) write/ day. If you do the math, that’s writing 16GB per day for a total of 46,720GB! Most consumers might not even see 10% of the daily rated write endurance on a daily basis. As an added feature, the drive comes with an enhanced BCH ECC engine that ensures highly reliable data transfer and increases your systems energy efficiency. Another factor to account for in system reliability is that solid state drives don’t have any physical moving components inside. This makes it much less susceptible to mechanical failure due to vibrations.

Other features to note about on this hard drive is the: flash management algorithm, static and dynamic wear-leveling, bad block management algorithm. These are management features that help improve the longevity of your solid state drive. Unlike hard disk drives, SSDs cannot rewrite over existing data, old data must be erased before new data can be written. The flash memory in SSDs are divided into blocks, which is further divided into pages. Data can be written into an empty page, but only whole blocks can be erased. To write over the invalid data in a block, all the valid data must be separated into another block. The original block with invalid data can now be wiped clean and written with new data. Garbage collection is the term for the process of relocating existing data to new locations and allowing the surrounding invalid data to be erased.

The bolded features above help to increase the endurance of your Biwin CPA25MS1210-032 PATA solid state drive. Wear-leveling manages your SSD memory controller to promote even erase/write usage on individual flash cells. The flash management and bad block management algorithms are similar to the TRIM feature. Normally without these features, performance of SSDs would degrade overtime as cell blocks were used up. When SSDs need to overwite previously used pages, it starts a cycle known as a write amplification phenomenon. It creates a read-erase-modify-write cycle that causes increased wear of the flash cells in the SSD. Like TRIM, these features comes in and reduces a number of those cycles by telling the memory controller what to relocate and what not to during garbage collection.

If you’re interested in more information, check out : https://www.storagereview.com/ssd_vs_hdd

CPA25MS1210-032 Specifications

Features

● Form factor: 100.0mm×70.0mm×9.5mm（L×W×H）

● Interface standard: 44-pin IDE/ATA interface

● Input voltage: +5.0V (±5%)

● Commercial operating temperature range from 0 to +70℃

● Flash management algorithm: static and dynamic wear-leveling, bad block management algorithm

● Supports dynamic power management and SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology)

● ECC (Error Correction Code ): Enhanced configurable BCH ECC engine

● Write endurance: >8years @ ( half of total capacity ) write/ day

● Read endurance: unlimited

● Data retention: 10 years

● MTBF:2,000,000 Hours

● Performance

-External Transfer Rate (Host Transfer Rate):133MB/s

-Sequential Read/ Write: －Up to 106/49 MB/S

Have you really taken a look at the Network Attached Storage (NAS) solutions that Seagate now offer? As a member of Seagate’s Partner Program, we are informed of Seagate’s latest and greatest solutions to your storage needs.

Seagate offers a 4-Bay Rackmount NAS with a small, space-saving chassis that is great for small businesses with up to 100 employees. It saves valuable floor-space for your company to make use of with other tasks. It’s compatible with both Windows and Mac with Time Machine support. It comes with Seagate NAS HDDs that are pre-installed into the system. The total storage capacity for this solution ranges from 4-16TB. The system is equipped with a dual-core Intel Atom processor running with a new optimized Seagate NAS OS to bring your filter transfer speeds up to 200MB/s.

If that is not enough storage space for your business, take a look at Seagate’s other offering. They offer a massive 8-Bay Rackmount NAS in a single 1U rack chassis for your convenience. It can fit eight 3.5″ hot swappable Seagate® Constellation ES.3 enterprise drives. Total data capacity of this solution can range from 8 – 32TB. This beast caters to businesses with up to 250 employees. It comes equipped with a 2.3GHz dual-core Intel processor bringing transfer speeds up to 200MB/s. This is also compatible with both Windows and Mac with Time Machine support.

These NAS solutions are only the tip of the ice berg. Seagate offers other NAS solutions that cater to the different magnitudes of storage that businesses need. At Saitech we try to offer as much of these solutions to you as possible to meet your needs.

To read more about Seagate’s NAS Solutions, visit:

https://www.seagate.com/external-hard-drives/network-storage/

The Western Digital Blue Ultra Slim HD’s are one of the thinnest hard drives I have seen. These hard drives are only 5mm thick, that’s a little thicker than three pennies stacked on one another. That’s thin! Western Digital has managed to pack in 500GB of maximum storage capacity in these models. Their 1TB models are only 7mm thick, that’s still slimmer than some of the competing brands. This ultra-slim design is about 35 percent thinner than most popular smartphones and weighs in at just 2.61 ounces, almost as light as a feather! The hard drive is also whisper quiet. By using Western Digital’s noise reducing technologies, the hard drive runs at merely 15 decibels while idle and 17 decibels during seek operations on average, that’s around the noise level of hearing a pin drop from a height of 1 centimeter at meter away from the location.

Western Digital has carrier over enterprise-grade craftsmanship into these Blue Ultra-Slim HDs. They have included high performance Dual Stage Actuators; this technology helps to reduce vibrations and acoustics that are emitted from the computer system and as a result, increase hard drive reliability and adds value by helping protect your investment.

These Ultra Blue hard drives are using new seeking algorithms and advanced power management features developed by Western Digital to improve your battery life and lower your power consumption. Another main feature of these hard drives is the NoTouch Ramp Load Technology. This technology was developed to keep the recording head from touching the disk media. That way, it ensures significantly less wear to the recording head and media and provides an extra measure against damage of the hard drive during transportation.

Western Digital’s ‘Power of Choice‘ gives you the choice between 4 categories of hard drives to meet your specific needs. If the WD Blue Ultra is not the right choice for you, take a look at the WD Green, WD Black, or WD Red hard drives!