Achim Roos

AMD’s FX processor line-up was supposedly designed with efficiency in mind, according to AMD. We're putting this claim to the test, assessing the Bulldozer architecture at a number of different clock rates and comparing the results to Intel's CPUs.

Flash-based solid-state drives with more than 64 or 128 GB of capacity are fairly small, but they're still really expensive relative to hard drives. Compressing the Windows partition frees up some space, but is that really a good idea?

Ironically, when it comes to performance, Intel’s Core i7-3960X is the real Bulldozer. Since its power consumption levels are lower than the Gulftown-based Core i7, it should also deliver amazing performance per watt as well. Is that really the case?

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!

Advanced Format technology makes it possible to build 9.5 mm high 2.5” hard disks with 500 GB per platter. The result is a range of slim and speedy storage giants.

We've already seen AMD's Bulldozer architecture come up short in the performance benchmarks. However, the company also claims it made important improvements to power consumption. Can FX-8150 at least score some points in the energy efficiency department?

We got our hands on four SAS 6 Gb/s RAID controllers from Adaptec, Areca, HighPoint, and LSI and ran them through RAID 0, 5, 6, and 10 workloads to test their mettle. Does your system need eight more ports of connectivity? We can answer that!

Hard drives able to hold 3 TB of data need to be considered carefully because they might not always work as expected. This round-up of four high-capacity disks compares products from Hitachi, Seagate, and Western Digital, then covers their caveats.

It's a foregone conclusion that SSDs are must-haves in performance-oriented PCs, but our testing reveals that solid-state drives are reasonable upgrades in older mainstream machines, too. We build three old boxes to gauge the impact of an SSD on each.

Currently, 2.5" enterprise drives are leaving their 3.5” competitors behind. They're faster, more flexible, and now they offer comparable capacities (we're up to 1 TB now). In this piece, it's Hitachi versus Seagate battling for high-density supremacy.

Version 7.0a of TrueCrypt offers many new features, including hardware-accelerated AES encryption via processors that support the technology. We discuss the new features and look at the performance impact of running an encrypted system partition.

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 repeat our extreme SSD RAID project for the third time and arrange 16 Samsung 470-series SSDs based on MLC NAND in a RAID 0 array to reach new levels of performance. We weren't as fortunate this time, but not for the reasons you might suspect.

RAID arrays with dozens of hard drives are not uncommon for reaching certain performance levels. We demonstrate how beautifully SSD RAID arrays can scale. There may come a time when a few flash-based drives will replace entire farms of hard disks.

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.

Intel's Atom D525 offers a faster clock rate than its predecessor at the same 13 W TDP. Obviously, the new dual-core chip is going to be faster. But after we determined that the Core i3 is more efficient, can Atom D525 usurp the desktop contender?

The new firmware provides very impressive numbers and takes SSDs to a higher level of performance well beyond HDDs as system drives in desktop computers.

Western Digital's VelociRaptor is here, and it comes with a bang. The new 10,000 RPM 2.5" SATA hard drive's primal scream is loud enough to intimidate the competition.