March 5, 2010
If you’re the sort of power user who’s hard on technology, especially out in the field, then ruggedized mobile storage might be apropos. Today, we’re looking at a pair of portable disks that can take drops and spills, while serving up 500GB of capacity.


– – – –
With rated write performance as high as 10 MB/s and capacities as high as 32 GB, there's plenty of choice in the microSDHC marketplace. Do the contenders actually hit their performance targets? Interestingly, some of them are actually quite a bit better!
It’s a good idea to use two CPU cores to speed up multiple drives in RAID 5 or 6 arrays and it’s even better to increase clock speeds. We put Qnap's TS-559 Pro+ with an Atom D525 dual-core CPU to the test: is it any faster than devices with Atom ...
The latest flash-based SD memory cards with UHS-I deliver up to 63 MB/s throughput. Users who want to exploit that performance need to pay attention to a few details, like making sure they upgrade to a USB 3.0 card reader. Which card is the fastest? ...
Three vendors of network-attached storage, Qnap, Synology, and Thecus, sent over Intel Atom-based NAS servers to test the effects of protecting your data via encryption. But performance and configuration options are not identical, as our testing shows.
The best ultra-portable USB 3.0 storage products from 16 to 128 GB square off in a grand comparison. We found wildly disparate transfer rates ranging from 200 MB/s down to a snail’s pace. At the end, though, two products rose to the top of our list. ...
We know that adding drives to a RAID array can help improve performance. But does adding storage to a NAS device really help push throughput higher? We put four-bay and five-bad units from Qnap up against each other and benchmark their transfer rates. ...
What do you do if you need to back up your data, transport it, synchronize it between several locations, and access it online? Hitachi’s Life Studio Mobile Plus is a brave attempt at solving that dilemma, but it only really appeals to mainstream users. ...