LaCie, the premium brand from Seagate Technology plc, announced today that its iconic Rugged Thunderbolt storage solution will be available in a 1 TB SSD capacity. With double the storage, the new LaCie Rugged is just as portable with no size or weight increase compared to the 500 GB offering. Plus, it still features the lightning–fast transfer rates of Thunderbolt and is tough in the field with shock, dust and water resistance.

"My expeditions take me all over the globe so I need equipment that's up for any terrain," said photographer and National Geographic Expeditions expert Kike Calvo. "The LaCie Rugged is my go–to hard drive because its fast speeds help back up my work quickly, and its toughness has yet to let me down. With the addition of drones into my workflow, I'm creating more content than ever before. So larger capacity in the same reliable enclosure means I can take fewer drives and save valuable luggage space."

WD, a Western Digital company, and world leader in storage solutions, today introduced the My Passport X portable hard drive for gamers. When connected to Xbox One or a PC, the sleek 2 TB My Passport X drive provides much-needed storage capacity for gamers to store up to 50 extra game titles, eliminating the need to delete previously purchased games from their Xbox One or PC hard drives and removing those “storage full” warning messages while allowing players to get back to their games. In addition to added storage, gamers can use My Passport X to take saved games to use on friends’ systems2 without having to download.

“Game file sizes are expanding to 36 GB per game and upwards, and are projected to continue growing,” said Tony Tate, vice president and general manager of WD’s Content Solutions unit. “Console gamers are able to store on average only 10 games on the 365 GB out of 500 GB that is available on the onboard hard drive. The My Passport X portable drive delivers a fast and easy way to expand capacity and enables an expanded library of games on the go.”

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, today unveiled the 850 EVO M.2 and 850 EVO mSATA solid state drive (SSD) lineups, which will launch today in 53 countries. The 850 EVO M.2 and mSATA SSDs are new form factors of the award-winning 850 EVO SSD that launched in December 2014 and features Samsung’s breakthrough 3D V-NAND technology for maximum performance and endurance. Just one-tenth the weight of a traditional 2.5-inch SSD, the M.2 and mSATA SSDs are ideal for users looking to upgrade their desktop or ultrathin PCs with high-capacity, high-performance storage.

“By offering the 850 EVO in multiple form factors, Samsung is giving every PC user the opportunity to upgrade their device with the speed, reliability and endurance of 3D V-NAND,” said Unsoo Kim, Senior vice president of branded product marketing team, Samsung Electronics. “There is growing demand for high-capacity SSDs and these new form factors will help drive further adoption of SSDs as well as expand Samsung’s leadership position in the consumer storage market.”

In addition to our review of Samsung's new 850 EVO M.2 SSD, CDRLabs has taken an in depth look at the 850 EVO mSATA. Designed for ultra-thin laptop PCs, this new addition to the 850 EVO family is available with up to 1TB of Samsung's 3-bit 3D V-NAND and, depending on the capacity, is powered by one of two different controllers. To compensate for the slow write speeds typically associated with 3-bit NAND, the 850 EVO mSATA is equipped with Samsung's TurboWrite write acceleration technology, which creates a high-performance write buffer in the SSD. The drive also offers support for Device Sleep (DEVSLP), hardware-based full disk encryption and Samsung's RAPID (Real-time Accelerated Processing of I/O Data) technology. By using free PC memory as a cache, RAPID can push the performance of the SSD beyond the limits of the current SATA specification.