Ah, flash drives. Everyone needs one and everyone has one. But here’s a flash drive that’ll make all your mates’ flash drives look like cheap plastic toys. LaCie just put out the FastKey, which technically isn’t a flash drive. It’s actually a real mobile solid state drive that’s packed into a metal case to make it as portable as any other flash drive. The advantage of doing that is speed and a bigger storage capacity, to the tune of transferring files up to 100 times faster via a USB 3.0 connection that makes it 100 times better than the average flash drive.
Before we get to the promised awesomeness of Seagate’s new hybrid drive for laptops, let’s get into laptop storage basics. Traditional hard disk drives (HDD) will give you the best price-per-gigabyte storage ratio, although they’re considerably slower than solid state drives. SSD on the other hand, come with a lower storage ceiling and are much more expensive, but offer faster performance, are more robust and energy-efficient—thanks mainly to the absence of moving parts. Now that that’s out of the way, here’s what this drive is all about: Seagate managed to merge SSD and HDD tech into the Momentus XT’s 2.5-inch frame, making for a laptop drive that’s cheaper than SSDs, faster than HDDs, and with a storage ceiling that tops off at 500GBs.
OCZ Technology packed in two of the most relevant storage-based tech into a slim portable drive called the Enyo. The Enyo features a solid state drive inside the slim aluminum shell, and connects to PCs via a SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface to make for a drive that’s listed to run up to 260MB/s read and 200MB/s write speeds as long as you plug it into a USB 3.0 port.
We’ve been barraged by a lot of new solid state drives the whole of last year, but it was just a bit hard to get on the solid state bandwagon when they’re still priced at the equivalent of an arm and a leg per gigabyte of storage space. OCZ’s latest is a breath of fresh air though, offering average Joes the chance to pick up a solid state drive upgrade on the cheap.
Memory maker Kingston has just announced that they’ll be boosting the performance on their second-gen SSDNow V Series line of mainstream drives without having to raise the price. Now, the performance upgrade is nice and all, but we’re loving the pricing part; that’s good news for anyone (like us) looking to upgrade to newer solid state drives but aren’t willing to fork over a serious amount of dough.
