Angelbird to Bring PCIe SSD on the Cheap and Iomega has a USB 3 external SSD

 

 

From Tom’s Hardware:

Extreme SSD performance over PCI-Express on the cheap? There’s hope!

A company called Angelbird is working on bringing high-performance SSD solutions to the masses, specifically, user upgradeable PCI-Express SSD solution.

via Angelbird to Bring PCIe SSD on the Cheap.

This is one of a pair of SSD announcements that came in on Tuesday. SSDs are all around us now and the product announcements are coming in faster and harder. The first one, is from a British company named Angelbird. Looking at the website announcing the specs of their product, it is on paper a very fast PCIe based SSD drive. Right up there with Fusion-io in terms of what you get for the dollars spent. I’m a little concerned however due to the reliance of an OS hosted in the firmware of the PCIe card. I would prefer something a little more peripheral like that the OS supports natively, rather than have the card become the OS. But this is all speculative until actual production or test samples hit the review websites and we see some kind of benchmarks from the likes of Tom’s Hardware or Anandtech.

From MacNN|Electronista:

Iomega threw itself into external solid-state drives today through the External SSD Flash Drive. The storage uses a 1.8-inch SSD that lets it occupy a very small footprint but still outperform a rotating hard drive:

Read more: http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/10/15/iomega.outs.external.usb.30.ssd/

The second story covers a new product from Iomega where we have for the first time an external SSD from a mainstream manufacturer. Price is at premium compared to the performance, but if you like the looks you’ll be willing to pay. It’s not bad speeds for reading and writing, but it’s not the best compared to the amount of money you’re paying. And why do they still use a 2.5″ external case if it’s internally a 1.8″ drive? Couldn’t they shrink it down to the old Firefly HDD size from back in the day? It should be the smaller.