Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos

We recently upgraded our 2010 reference platform, and it should do justice to the latest SATA 6Gb/s drives and the TRIM command. The first part of our spring SSD roundup includes drives from Crucial, Intel, OCZ, Solidata, and Toshiba.

Western Digital is in the process of reinventing its Raptor product line, delivering improved performance and a new 600GB capacity ceiling. In today's review, we compare it to its predecessor and the other popular magnetic drives populating the market.

Eight different portable hard drives, spanning everything from 250GB to 1TB and centering on 2.5” and 1.8” form factors, compete against each other based on design and functionality. Similar though they seem, they're far from equal under the hood.

With the adoption of flashed-based solid state drives, 1.8" hard drives have seemingly fallen out of favor. However, we're taking a look at Toshiba’s three latest generations of 1.8” hard drive technology to see where the form factor might be heading.

Soon, 4.8 Gb/s USB 3.0 and 6 Gb/s SATA will be hitting the mainstream. But be careful when you buy your next mainstream motherboard; some don't handle these technologies very well. We compare three implementations and recommend best practice solutions.

The new Gulftown processor has six physical cores, but Intel’s Hyper-Threading presents 12 logical processors to the operating system. Does Hyper-Threading really add more performance? What about its effect on power consumption? Both are measured today.

Tom's Hardware recently had the chance to interview Steve Pereira, vice president of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies in the EMEA region, who talked about SSDs and the future of the hard drive in 2010 and beyond.

Intel is preemptively launching the first hexa-core desktop CPU weeks ahead of actual availability. But how does this 32nm monster perform when we take a deeper look into performance per watt? After yesterday's preview, today we look closer at efficiency.

Would you rather use 7-Zip, FreeArc, WinRAR, or WinZip? We put four of the most popular file archiving tools to the test, analyzing compression ratios and performance. Spoiler alert: WinZip 14, the latest version of this popular title, gets creamed.

SSDs might be the fastest storage option today, but by no means is it the most popular. Magnetic media offers high throughput and proven reliability for existing ecosystems. We looked at developments in four enterprise hard drive generations.

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.

Intel has S-models for several Core 2 processors that offer lower power consumption and comparable performance. However, the first S-model in the Core i5 family is actually slower than its regular counterpart—and it's even less efficient, overall!

Third-generation terabyte hard drives have been available for a while. Today we're taking a look at a trio of 1TB disks from Hitachi in order to gauge what benefits, if any, you'll see from adopting a drive with increased storage density.

In the future, an increasing number of hard drives will be writing data in 4KB chunks (rather than 512 bytes) to increase storage capacities. Performance isn’t impacted, as long as you follow some rules. We put WD’s new EARS series on the test bench.

We've measured 100W+ at idle from desktop PCs running the first crop of dual-core CPUs. The latest 32nm Clarkdale-based platforms let you build powerful desktops that idle as low as 25W. Today we're looking at the efficiency of such a system.

We'll take more speed and better efficiency any day of the week! We've already looked at the 2TB Western Digital drives. Now we line up Hitachi’s Deskstar 7K2000, Samsung's Spinpoint F3 1TB, and Seagate’s Barracuda XT for the first drive battle of 2010.

When it comes to overclocking, the theoretical peak for your processor is probably less interesting than a balanced efficiency increase. Thus, we went on a mission to figure out the best clock rate for Intel's new dual-core Clarkdale-based Core i5-661.

Flash-based SSDs in enterprise RAID often require serious modifications to storage subsystems already in place. Adaptec now offers a way to upgrade existing RAID solutions to deliver much-improved I/O performance in a transparent and convenient manner.

With ATI's Radeon HD 5000-series GPUs and Intel's Clarkdale-based processors coming loaded with multi-media functionality, it's a great time to build an HTPC. We compare three enclosures from Moneual, Thermaltake, and Zalman, all priced very differently.

Starting with its dual-core Clarkfield-based Core i5 processors, Intel is introducing AES New Instructions to its architecture. We've already seen great benefits from a number of synthetic benchmarks, but what are the real-life advantages of this tech?

Ever wonder what would happen if you replaced an old 7,200 RPM notebook drive with a brand new one? We run a current-generation drive against a two generation-old disk to measure the potential performance and battery life gains you might expect.

ASRock, Foxconn, Gigabyte, and MSI sent us their latest P55-based microATX motherboards for users wanting smaller solutions. We benchmarked, overclocked, and measured the efficiency of these diminutive platforms that work with Lynnfield and Clarkdale.

Adding external storage to your PC can be a mess if you aren't familiar with the various interfaces in play. Should you go for compatibility with USB 2.0 or is FireWire a better choice? What about eSATA, which matches native hard drive performance?

AMD has the Athlon II X4 and the Phenom II X4. Intel offers Core 2 Quad, Core i5, and Core i7. They all have different characteristics and performance, but what’s the performance and efficiency ranking if all are operated at identical clock speeds?