Today, CDRLabs brings you a review of Plextor's new 256GB M5M Series mSATA SSD, the PX-256M5M. Designed for ultrabooks, tablets and other portable devices with limited space, the M5M provides high-performance and reliability in a space one-eighth the size of a standard 2.5 inch drive. This pint-sized SSD combines Marvell's 88SS9187 "Monet" controller with Toshiba's 19nm Toggle Mode MLC NAND to deliver up to 540MB/s read and 430MB/s write transfer rates. The M5M also supports Plextor's True Speed and True Protect technologies as well as the SATA Device Sleep (DEVSLP) standard which extends the battery life of a device by reducing the drive's power consumption when its not in use.

Seagate Technology today took the wraps off its new Seagate NAS HDD— a cutting-edge drive custom-built for always-on, one- to five-bay network attached storage (NAS) systems. Engineered with performance and reliability in mind, the new drives are available in multiple capacity points including a 4TB option— the industry’s highest capacity NAS hard disk drive (HDD) solution available— and strong industry support from nine NAS system partners.

“Today about 50 percent of NAS arrays are sold diskless meaning that customers are challenged with identifying and installing the right storage for their system. By developing a drive like NAS HDD, we’ve taken the guesswork out of it and made it easy for customers to identify the right drive for their system,” said Scott Horn, Seagate vice president of marketing. “By collaborating closely with a variety of partners who specialize in NAS systems, we’re making what was a confusing effort into a plug-and-play one.”

Featuring up to 4TB of storage the drive now enables NAS systems, such as those utilized in homes and small to midsize businesses (SMB), to provide up to 20TB of data in a five-bay NAS array. And with over 30 percent capacity improvement over competitive offerings, the NAS HDD 4TB drive delivers the highest capacity available on the market.

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Intel Corporation today announced the Intel Solid-State Drive DC S3500 Series, its latest solid-state drive (SSD) for data centers and cloud computing. Designed for read-intensive applications such as Web hosting, cloud computing and data center virtualization, the Intel DC S3500 Series is an ideal replacement for traditional hard disk drives (HDD), allowing data centers to save significant costs by moving toward an all-SSD storage model.

Intel SSDs, including the Intel SSD DC S3500 Series, enable transformational improvements in cloud infrastructure, fostering new and enriching Web experiences. End customers experience quicker Web page loads and improved response times as a result of dramatically improved data access times and reduced latency. IT managers and cloud developers are rewarded with improved total cost of ownership as a result of reduced power consumption, more consistent performance and smaller space requirements. More than half of U.S. businesses now employ cloud computing applications, and IDC predicts that worldwide spending on cloud services will reach $44.2 billion this year1. Data centers powering these cloud applications need to quickly, efficiently and reliably scale to handle the tremendous growth of connected users and data traffic.

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QNAP, Inc. today announced the app-centric QTS 4.0 Turbo NAS system is available for the existing Turbo NAS series, including TS-x69, x19 and x12 series. Users of the applicable Turbo NAS models can download and update to the latest QTS 4.0 system to enjoy the entire new NAS management experience and the abundance of home entertainment applications.

“The launch of QTS 4.0 alongside the Turbo NAS TS-x20 and x21 series was a tremendous success, and we have received many positive responses from our users,” said Meiji Chang, general manager of QNAP. “Now more users can experience the easy-to-operate yet feature-rich QTS 4.0 that makes storing and managing home digital data easier, and enjoy the stored multimedia contents with more fun.”

The app-centric QTS 4.0 integrates multi-window operations into the web-based user interface, adds the Qsync utility for file synchronizing across different devices and file sharing across groups and communities, supports several smart mobile apps, and more. The abundant multimedia applications the QTS 4.0 offers a greatly enhanced entertainment experience in the modern connected home.

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