Understanding Wireless Storage: Kingston Wi-Drive and Seagate GoFlex Satellite

Hypothetical situation here: let’s say you bought an iPhone or iPad, but cheaped out and got a 16GB model. You’ve got around 10GB worth of music, a few gigs in photos and applications, and you lose the rest to formatting and the OS itself. Basically, you’re maxed on capacity. Day-to-day, this isn’t a huge issue, but let’s say you’re going on vacation and want to have some movies to watch so that you can avoid the customary in-flight chick flick [or replace with whatever type of movies you dislike]. HD movies aren’t storage friendly, they take a solid chunk of storage space, and you don’t want gut your portable music library for the sake of watching a couple of decent movies on the plane. So what do you do?
Fret not, there is now a solution to that dilemma by way of Kingston and Seagate, among others. Both have recently launched wireless storage devices, streaming your media files to up to three mobile devices via WiFi. Now, both of these are non-ideal solutions to a relatively marginal problem, but that’s to be expected in any newly conceived market. With the shift to cloud-based data and media streaming for mobile devices, there is going to be a gradual de-emphasizing of device storage. We’re already seeing that in a big way with Google’s Cloud OS and Apple’s iCloud service, so wireless storage technologies are going to play an important role in handling media streaming for the future. The two devices we’re looking at today are pricey and aren’t perfect by any means, but they point the way to what the future of local media storage might look like.

Device Hardware

Seagate’s GoFlex Satellite builds off the storage giant’s expertise in hard drives by creating a wireless media streamer based on a portable hard drive. It looks like a larger version of the company’s GoFlex hard drives, albeit with a power switch and an AC adapter input port, and ships in a 500GB configuration with a 5400RPM 2.5" drive inside. Compared to the standard 500GB GoFlex drive, the Satellite is 50% thicker and adds about a half inch to the length and a quarter inch to the width. Interestingly, we noticed a 10mm difference between the listed length dimension and what I measured (130mm versus the 120mm figure quoted in the specsheet). Either way, it’s bigger than the typical 2.5” external drive, but the Satellite shares the same enclosure as the as the 1TB and 1.5TB GoFlex drives, which have thicker hard drives than their lower-capacity brethren.

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Holiday Budget System Buyers' Guide: RAMs, Hard Drives, SSDs, GPUs, PSUs, Cases

RAM

DDR3 prices seem to have bottomed out and are holding steady at around $25 for 2 x 2GB kits and $35 for 2 x 4GB kits. While it might be tempting to spend $10 more on an 8GB kit of DDR3, 4GB is more than ample for basic to moderate multitasking. If the system will be used for extensive multitasking or for applications that benefit from lots of RAM like Photoshop, you might as well spring for an 8GB kit. Both Mushkin and GSkill offer 4GB kits that are usually less than $30 shipped. While these appear to be unremarkable budget memory sticks, my testing indicates both are capable of undervolting to 1.4V (from the default 1.5V) while running at stock speeds, and both kits can be modestly overclocked at the stock 1.5V setting. Additionally, GSkill's budget 8GB kit was capable of modest overclocking (though not undervolting).

Hard drives

As alluded to earlier, prices on hard drives have risen lately in response to flooding in Thailand and other areas of southeast Asia. In my previous buyers' guides, I've recommended 500GB drives that were available at every day prices of $40 shipped. Unfortunately, $40 500GB drives are not currently available from any of the major US internet retailers. How long these elevated prices will persist is anyone's guess, but from what I can gather, the supply disruption will last at least a few more months. It's possible prices will continue to rise, but for now, it's difficult to find 500GB drives for less than $50 shipped (day to day pricing). As much as it pains me to say it, you can save a few dollars by going for smaller capacity drives. For many basic users, 160GB might be enough storage space.

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OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G Review: A Fast MacBook Air SSD Upgrade

I've written previously about the SSD lottery you play when you buy a new MacBook Air. As with many commodity components, Apple sources its SSDs from two sources. For now, that appears to be Toshiba and Samsung. Apple tends to pick suppliers that can deliver a reliable product in the quantities it's interested in. In the storage space at least, Apple doesn't seem to be overly concerned with performance but rather making sure the solution works.

A year ago, the Toshiba and Samsung controllers offered fairly similar performance. These days the same isn't true. While Samsung has updated its controllers, Toshiba's solution still offers the fairly abysmal random write performance it did a year ago. With the recent release of the Samsung SSD 830, I expect the trend of Samsung drives increasing in performance will continue next year as well.
Unlike the rest of Apple's notebook lineup however, it's not so easy to just swap in a higher performing (or larger capacity) SSD in your MacBook Air. The very first MBAs used a PATA LIF connector, a rarity on most drives. Apple eventually transitioned to a SATA LIF connector, and then with the release of the 2010 MacBook Air we encountered a new thin form factor SSD with a custom interface connector. In all of those cases, the market for third party MacBook Air SSDs popped up at some point post-launch. The 2010/2011 MacBook Air has been no different.
If you've followed the aftermarket Mac support business then OWC should be no stranger to you. If you haven't heard of OWC from their Mac efforts, there's always the fact that second to only OCZ, no one has been quicker at releasing SSDs based on brand new SandForce controllers.
OWC put out an aftermarket drive for owners of 2010 MacBook Airs based on the 3Gbps SF-1200 controller. For 2011 MBA owners there's a 6Gbps SF-2281 option: the OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G.

Gallery: OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G MacBook Air SSD

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The drive is available in 120GB and 240GB capacities, for $280 and $550 respectively. Both drives come with pentalobe and torx drivers to aid in opening your MBA and replacing your old drive.

For another $35 OWC will sell you an external USB 2.0/3.0 enclosure that can house your old MBA SSD either to help you transfer your data or give you a sweet, high performance external drive once you're done.
OWC sent me a 240GB Aura Pro, which I installed into an 11-inch MacBook Air. The installation process was a cinch. The only hiccup was that I couldn't just clone my 256GB Toshiba SSD using Disk Utility since the Aura Pro was technically smaller. Instead I used Lion's internet recovery to download and install a fresh copy of OS X, before restoring my data and installing benchmarks.

If you've followed our SSD reviews you'll know what to expect next. SandForce's SF-2281 controller is the fastest option on the market today, while the Toshiba controller Apple uses is pretty much on the opposite end of the spectrum. I ran our standard four-corners Iometer test to put into perspective just how much faster the OWC upgrade is:

2011 MacBook Air SSD Performance Comparison
	4KB Random Write (8GB LBA Space, QD3)	4KB Random Read (QD3)	128KB Sequential Write	128KB Sequential Read
OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G	88.4 MB/s	30.4 MB/s	495.1 MB/s	451.4 MB/s
13-inch MacBook Air (Mid 2011) - Toshiba SSD	1.65 MB/s	18.0 MB/s	204.2 MB/s	189.5 MB/s
11-inch MacBook Air (Mid 2011) - Samsung SSD	27.2 MB/s	44.6 MB/s	258.0 MB/s	234.4 MB/s
11-inch MacBook Air (Late 2010) - Toshiba SSD	2.49 MB/s	31.1 MB/s	147.0 MB/s	113.0 MB/s

Performance is just staggering. The comparison is borderline unfair because both the Samsung and Toshiba controllers Apple uses in its MacBook Air are really a generation old at this point, while the Mercury Aura Pro Express is the absolute latest and greatest 6Gbps solution SandForce offers. The performance advantage is noticeable. The upgrade does make everything feel snappier, particularly compared to a MBA equipped with a Toshiba SSD. Large file transfers complete quicker and heavy multitasking workloads see an improvement as well.
SandForce achieves this performance advantage by using real time compression and data deduplication algorithms to reduce the amount of data actually written to the NAND. Since much of what we write to our drives in the course of normal use is easily compressible data, SandForce's technology is quite effective. Where the controller falls short however is if you're moving incompressible data, for example already highly compressed videos or encrypted data. While highly compressed content like H.264 movies will really only impact sequential read/write speed, enabling full disk encryption under OS X impacts all of your data. Truly random data is impossible to compress/dedupe, so I enabled FileVault under Lion and re-ran our performance tests on the Aura Pro:
(Encryp

2011 MacBook Air SSD Performance Comparison
	4KB Random Write (8GB LBA Space, QD3)	4KB Random Read (QD3)	128KB Sequential Write	128KB Sequential Read
OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G	88.4 MB/s	30.4 MB/s	495.1 MB/s	451.4 MB/s
OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G (Encrypted)	80.8 MB/s	28.8 MB/s	184.8 MB/s	431.9 MB/s
Apple Toshiba SSD (Encrypted)	1.13 MB/s	19.4 MB/s	178.7 MB/s	195.8 MB/s

Sequential write performance takes a pretty significant hit, but the rest of the metrics look ok. In fact, I'd say even if you're running with your drive encrypted you'll have a better experience on the OWC drive than with either of the Apple SSDs.
With the OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G you get much better performance than the stock Apple SSDs regardless of usage. Is there any downside to going with the aftermarket drive? Unfortunately there appears to be one:

Power Consumption Comparison
	Idle	Load (Sequential Write)
OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G	6.2W	19.0W
OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G (Encrypted)	6.2W	18.0W
Apple Toshiba SSD	5.5W	16.4W

It's natural for the OWC solution to draw more power under load, you're getting over twice the performance so the increase in power draw is actually not an issue (better power efficiency since you'll be at idle quicker than with a stock SSD). The bigger concern is what happens at idle. My 11-inch MacBook Air typically idles at 5.5W, swapping in the OWC drive increased that idle power consumption to 6.2W. Now this is measured at the wall, so it takes into account AC adapter inefficiency. The actual impact at idle should be somewhere in the 300mW - 400mW range. For a mostly idle workload you'd probably see a 30 minute reduction in battery life.

Final Words

The OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G is a well executed SSD upgrade for 2011 MacBook Air owners. You get an absolutely huge performance increase and an option for users who want the entry level 2011 MBAs but with a larger capacity SSD. If your MacBook Air is your primary workhorse, perhaps even your desktop replacement, and you got stuck with a Toshiba SSD the OWC option makes a lot of sense. OWC thankfully provides everything you need in the box to get into your MacBook Air and swap drives.

The downside is power consumption. At idle the SandForce controller simply draws more power than the Toshiba controller in the MBA we tested. The overall impact on battery life won't be tremendous (perhaps 5% on a mostly idle workload), but if you're already on the edge of usability with the battery life from your stock MacBook Air you may want to remain stock.

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Seagate's New Barracuda 3TB (ST3000DM001) Review

Platter density has been the crutch of hard drive makers in recent history. Increasing spindle speeds can reduce random access latency, but at the expense of cost and thermals. Improvements in random access performance via increasing spindle speed pale in comparison to what is possible with solid state storage, not to mention that driving motors at speeds beyond 10,000 RPM becomes quite difficult. The focus on increasing platter density is also difficult, but higher density platters can actually lead to reductions in power consumption rather than the opposite (through a reduction in the number of platters per drive). There's also the fact that if you can cram more data on a single platter there's a direct impact on sequential accesses.

Yesterday Seagate announced its transition to 1TB platters with its new 7200RPM-only Barracuda line. The move marked a significant change for Seagate as it is phasing out the Barracuda Green brand, and shifting the focus of the high-performance Barracuda XT. The Barracuda Green was a rebrand of Seagate's Barracuda LP, designed to convey the lower power consumption enabled by its 5900RPM spindle speed.
Seagate decided that the performance loss of moving to 5900RPM wasn't justified by the power savings. It believed that by introducing a more power efficient 7200RPM drive it could deliver the best of both worlds, negating the purpose of the Green line. For most desktops, Seagate has a point. The couple of watts you save by slowing down the motor aren't really realized in a system that idles at 60W and can consume over 100W under load. On the other hand, the performance drop is definitely noticeable. Hard drives have pretty bad random access performance to begin with, and slowing spindle speed isn't going to help:

Impact of Rotational Speed on Random Access Performance - Barracuda vs Green
	7200RPM	5900RPM
4KB Random Write Performance (8GB LBA)	1.20 MB/s	0.90 MB/s

Random write performance goes up by almost 20% when you compare the Barracuda XT to the Barracuda Green. Performance in this test is mostly governed by spindle speed (and firmware), so it makes Seagate's case perfectly.
There is a segment that Seagate isn't considering as it decides to axe the Green line: the home server market. If you're doing mass archival to some external storage, random performance is likely not a big concern. Instead, all you want is cheap, low-power storage.
Come February 2012, if you want a Green drive, you'll have to shop with Western Digital.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Barracuda XT has been Seagate's performance flagship. This brand isn't going away. Instead Seagate will introduce a solid state hybrid drive under the Barracuda XT banner at some point in the future.

Everything else now falls under the bare Barracuda label. High capacity drives should become more power efficient thanks to a reduction in the number of platters, and performance should go up thanks to increased platter density.
The new 1TB platter drives all carry the M001 suffix to their model numbers:

Seagate's 1TB-per-platter Barracuda Lineup
Model Number	Capacity	MSRP
ST3000DM001	3TB	$179.99
ST2000DM001	2TB	$105.99
ST1500DM001	1.5TB	$83.99
ST1000DM003	1TB	$71.99

Seagate sent along a new 3TB Barracuda for us to put through the paces.

The Performance

With lower power consumption in mind, Seagate is now using a 40nm dual-core LSI controller on the 1TB-platter Barracudas. The chip is physically a lot smaller than what was used in the original 3TB Barracuda XT:

Seagate continues to use 64MB of DDR2-800 as the Barracuda's DRAM cache.
The big news is obviously the platter count with the new 3TB Barracuda. While the previous drive used five platters, the new 3TB drive only uses three. It's this reduction that Seagate hopes will give it the performance and power advantages necessary to not only move the family forward, but render the outgoing Green redundant.
To find out, we threw some of our storage suite at the drive and compared it to the old Barracuda XT and Green drives. I also ripped the drive out of Seagate's 4TB GoFlex Desk enclosure, a 5-platter Barracuda XT, and included it in the comparisons.

Random write performance actually dropped a bit compared to the older Barracuda XT. It's still higher than the Green drive, but it looks like Seagate has tweaked the drive's firmware a bit resulting in lower random write performance.

Sequential performance is up a bit over the original 3TB Barracuda XT, but about in-line with what we'd expect from a modern day high-capacity drive. Even compared to the latest 4TB Barracuda XT, we see a slight increase in performance.
Despite the sequential performance advantage, PCMark 7 showed the new Barracuda on-par with the Barracuda XT:

I ran the drives through our light and heavy 2011 workloads from our SSD reviews (which takes absolutely forever to run on mechanical drives) and saw some interesting data:

The Barracuda XT was consistently faster than the new 3TB Barracuda in our trace based benchmarks. Keep in mind that both of these tests were created on and for SSDs. Both tests involve a much heavier usage pattern and demand ultra quick response time, likely giving these hard drives an extremely strenuous workout. While the new Barracuda is faster than the outgoing Green, it seems as if the firmware isn't quite as tuned for performance as the XT. The difference does make sense, particularly if it translates into lower power usage given the new mainstream focused Barracuda lineup.

Power consumption is obviously lower than the old Barracuda XT, but still not quite as low as a 5400RPM Barracuda Green or WD Caviar Green. If you were expecting the new Barracuda to completely replace the outgoing Barracuda Green you will be disappointed. It looks like if you need a high capacity, low power 3.5" drive going forward it won't be from Seagate.

Final Words

The new 3TB Barracuda is a bit faster in sequential performance than the old Barracuda XT, at lower power consumption. In typical desktop workloads I think it's fairly safe to say that you wouldn't notice the difference between the Barracuda and Barracuda XT.
As our SSD tests showed us however, when really pushed the new Barracuda performs somewhere in between the old Green and the XT. Seagate appears to have optimized the drive's behavior for lower power rather than peak performance. If you want the absolute best performance out of a 3.5" drive, stick with the XT or wait for the new hybrid version.

Given the tremendous advantage SSDs offer over even the fastest 3.5" drives, I'm personally ok with the performance tradeoff under very heavy load so long as you've got an SSD somewhere in your system as well. I'm not sure I particularly agree with Seagate's decision to abandon the 5900RPM drive market, but thankfully there are other options available if you want a high capacity, lower power drive.

.Source: http://www.anandtech.com

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