From time to time, companies like to present a product that will serves as their flagship and raise the awareness of the buyers, even though by itself it’s not that practical. Basically, it’s a demonstration of power. Kingston decided this time to do it with HyperX Predator flash drive of monstrous capacity of 512 GB!

The idea of having the same workspace on multiple PCs is not a new one, but never before has it been implemented in this way. It was necessary to have a fast and reliable SSD of small dimensions, fast USB 3.0 connection and Windows 8 with all its technologies.

The folks at Kingston have long shunned SandForce controllers in their Value SSD series. SSDNow V100 didn’t have one, because it was reserved only for the most expensive models back at the time. When V200 appeared on the market, everyone secretly expected it to come equipped with a SandForce, at least an older one. Kingston failed to see the potential of this move, so they delivered V200 with JMicron’s solution. The latter didn’t fare very well with their SSD controllers when the move to SATA 6 Gbps was made, which is the exact reason why V200 couldn’t gain widespread recognition either. Simply enough, other companies saw the direction in which SSD development was heading and adapted their policies accordingly. At long last, we’re able to greet SSDNow V300 equipped with a SandForce SF-2281 controller. That’s not the end of it, though; Kingston claims that this controller has been specially optimised for use on V300, so it was only natural for us to try and establish the truthfulness of this claim.

Verbatim has been very busy lately promoting their concept called USM. The idea behind it is to make a portable HDD very usable and far more resistant to becoming obsolete, in the sense of technology and interface used. We’ll go more in-depth on this a bit later.

 After the first generation of the SandForce controller, the successor was hotly anticipated. Although the data compression principle was a bit controversial at first, the second generation of SandForce controller logic launched an industry-wide trend in the SSD market. You could hardly find a single SSD manufacturer that didn’t have at least a few models based on the SF-2281 chip in their portfolio. The relatively accessible price of controller chips, which based their top-grade performance on the data compression principle, carried a few compromises along as well.

Firstly, the second-gen SandForce controllers didn’t have their own buffer memory, but used a part of the flash memory instead. This is why 64 GB SSDs actually came with 60 GB of usable space, and the same applies to 128 (120) GB and 256 (240) GB models. The second and more important reason was worse performance with incompressible data. Although most of the data a typical user works with daily is compressible, there are those who didn’t find this feature very attractive, due to the specific nature of their activities.

It was with the appearance of netbooks that the first SSD (Solid State Drive) devices with the mSATA (micro-SATA) connector came about. Some of the more popular models had the capability of using a replacement disk (faster or of a higher capacity), effectively giving an upgrade option to the user. Yet it took the influx of ultrabooks for this sort of peripheral to become interesting to a wider user base in the upper range, not least because ultrabooks actually have the computing power required to make good use of what SSDs can unleash. We've recently tested Acer's M3 ultrabook, which contained a 500 GB HDD and a 20 GB mSATA SSD, the latter being explicitly used for caching purposes. Everything was set up so that the user doesn't even know the SSD is there, except indirectly with the fantastic boot-up times, provided courtesy of the said SSD.

It was merely a matter of time before Verbatim joined the SandForce saga and present their own product based on the hyper-popular SF-2281 controller. We’ve already met about a dozen SSDs based on this platform, so no need to repeat ourselves. Verbatim sent us a model with a capacity of 120 GB, and the high-quality metal casing typical of their first generation of SSDs has been carried over, which is great news.

It’s impossible to mention the data storage market without at least hinting at the recent floods on Thailand, which managed to spoil many plans regarding shipped quantities and retail prices of HDDs. Yet it seems that luck is a wheel indeed. The lack and price hike of HDDs caused SSD manufacturers to hit the market with full force. Within six months, all SSD manufacturers refreshed and expanded their SSD offer. Besides the most expensive ones, more accessible models have been made available as well, but also hybrid versions which combine HDD and SSD technologies.

The concept of ultrabooks included SSDs exclusively, and even a good portion of regular notebook PCs now come with an SSD for caching data for the most frequently used applications. For those who find SSDs too expensive at the moment, there’s the option of hybrid drives, such as models from Seagate’s Momentus series, a combination of cheap low-capacity SSD and a standard HDD, interconnected via Intel’s RST or an additional cache drive. The model that we got for testing, however, is signed by OCZ, and responds to the name Synapse.

Western Digital is a brand known for setting standards in terms of external storage drives. From MyBook, over Elements, right to the Passport series, this manufacturer’s external disks have been much appreciated globally. A few years ago, WD boldly stepped on previously unfamiliar turf – the field of media players. Several models that they subsequently put out managed to reach an almost cult status, with advanced users particularly appreciating the almost limitless capabilities in terms of software replacements.

After a long period of strategic planning, WD has decided to reach out into the NAS (Network-Attached Storage) market as well. The said market niche is a very picky one, with buyers usually looking for a plethora of options and a lot of storage space. Calling this device category “personal cloud storage”, WD seems to have opted for a very interesting way of marketing their first NAS device, called WD MyBook Live.