Hasta La Gadget!

It’s time to get serious about a solid state drive upgrade with Drobo’s brand new B1200i SSD, complete with what the manufacturer says will be a performance boost of up to 300 percent over previous product iterations. This hardware will bring on a hybrid of solid state technology and traditional hard disk drives like SAS or SATA. And what’s fabulous for current owners of the B1200i is this: a software update is all you’ll need to gain new performance and functionality from Drobo, and it’s free!

This software update for you ol’ B1200i owners will be listed at http://www.drobo.com/support/updates.php where you’ll be able to download and load it all for free. The new new B1200i SSD release announced this week has the ability to make use of a small number of SSDs alongside hard disk drives to make one single economically sound storage system. This system has also attained VMware Ready status with vSphere 5.0 certification.

Microsoft, VMware and Citrix environments will be able to make good use of the Drobo B1200i SSD, as will data protection solutions supporting Veeam, Acronis and Symantec backup and replication. Essentially you’re getting a product that works essentially anywhere you need it to – and with its ability to combine the many bits of storage and backup hardware you’ve already got on hand, you’ll be saving a ton of potential dollars you’d otherwise be spending in the future.

Have a peek at the lovely selection of Drobo content we’ve got in our Drobo portal and make sure you check out our Drobo timeline below as well to see which products appeared over the past few weeks and months that landed us here with the new and improved Drobo B1200i SSD!

Drobo B1200i SSD announced with 300x performance is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Order up a Retina MacBook Pro and you’ll likely be confronted with a gravelly message about how the SSD is “built into the computer” and not user-upgradeable. As it turns out, that’s not quite true — so long as you’re prepared to ignore a whole bunch of other warnings written inside the chassis itself, iFixit has shown how to remove the factory drive and now OWC has a new SSD to replace it with. The only downside is the cost: at $580, OWC‘s 480GB Mercury Aura Pro is actually more expensive than Apple’s official 512GB upgrade. In an effort to sweeten the deal, OWC is offering those who buy before September 30th a compact USB 3.0 enclosure to make use of the freed-up drive. Alternatively, you may want to wait for prices to drop or for OWC to offer an even bigger capacity with better cost / benefits.

Filed under: Laptops, Storage

OWC offers 480GB SSD upgrade for Retina MacBook Pro, requires screwdriver and careful math originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Aug 2012 06:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Macrumors  |  OWC  | Email this | Comments

Plextor’s newly launched M5 Pro is angling to be the top dot on the SATA III SSD spec charts — and looks like it will mostly succeed. The Marvell Monet controller lets the unit hit a continuous 540 MB/s read and 450 MB/s write speeds for the larger models, as well as a hefty 94,000 read and 86,000 write IOPS. Those figures would put it ahead of or alongside most of its competitors except in steady write speeds, but Plextor claims that hustle is not the model’s only trick. It also makes use of “True Speed” tech to minimize performance drops with age, uses 128-bit error correction to eliminate data inaccuracy and offers 256-bit full-drive encryption. The 128GB, 256GB or 512GB drives will be available mid-August for prices that have yet to be determined, but it’s likely to be well north of its budget namesake, the M5S. You’ll find the full PR after the break.

Continue reading Plextor M5 Pro bulges SSD envelope with 94K IOPS and 540MB/s

Filed under: Storage

Plextor M5 Pro bulges SSD envelope with 94K IOPS and 540MB/s originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Aug 2012 13:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Apple has increased the customization options for its MacBook Pro with Retina Display, now allowing the entry-level model to be tweaked with difference processors and storage. Originally, the $2,199 “base-spec” Retina MacBook Pro was fixed to a specific chip – the 2.3GHz quadcore Core i7 – and 256GB of SSD storage, with only flexibility in how much RAM was included. Now, though, Apple has opened things up for more options.

There are now three processor choices, the original 2.3GHz or a 2.6GHz quadcore for $100 more, or a 2.7GHz quadcore for $250 more. The $2,799 model still starts at 2.6GHz, with 2.7GHz as an option.

As for storage, it’s now possible to upgrade the flash drive to 512GB or 756GB. Neither come cheap, however, being priced at $500 or $1,000 more respectively. Still, it answers complaints of those buyers who wanted more capacity but weren’t concerned with the faster processor, and so whom resented the $600 difference (though now they’ll only save $100).

There are reports that some shoppers are having difficulties getting the new options to register in their cart, or indeed aren’t seeing them active at all, though at time of writing we were able to customize both processor and storage and add that model to our cart.

Either way, you get the innovative and pixel-dense Retina Display itself, which offers both a hugely-detailed 1440 x 900 mode or an HD-besting 1920 x 1200 option. There’s more on the MacBook Pro with Retina Display in our full review.

[timleine]

[via MacRumors]

Apple cheapest MacBook Pro with Retina adds CPU and storage options is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

If you feel like your computer needs a boost but are struggling for cash, here’s something that might help: Crucial has just launched a range of value SSDs, and you can snag the cheapest one for just $50. More »