Mushkin Scorpion Deluxe PCIe SSD

Mushkin sneds word that it will present its new Scorpion Deluxe PCIe SSD and the Ventura Ultra USB 3.0 flash drive at the 2013 Flash Summit. Mushkin will -- at the 2013 Flash Summit -- show off the final production units of the Scorpion Deluxe PCIe SSD and Ventura Ultra USB 3.0 flash drive for the first time. The Scorpion Deluxe PCIe SSD is a powerfully fast PCI Express solid-state drive that reach 2165 MB/s read and 1990 MB/s write.

Samsung launches first 3D V-NAND SSDs, reserved for enterprise

Just a week after Samsung announced they had started mass-producing 3D Vertical NAND, the company has launched a range of solid state drives that use the technology. At this stage the 3D V-NAND SSDs are aimied only at enterprise applications, although Samsung promises that consumer-oriented drives are in the pipeline.

Corsair launches range-topping Force Series GS SSDs

Corsair has added a new member to its Force family of solid-state drives. The Force Series GS combines the current-generation SF-2281 controller with Toggle DDR NAND to create its fastest SSD yet, achieving maximum random 4k write performance of up to 90K IOPS.

The Force Series GS SSDs features SATA 6Gb/s connectivity, TRIM support to maintain performance over time, and low power operation for longer battery life in notebooks. The 2.5-inch form factor drives also ship with a 3.5-inch adapter so they can be easily installed into notebooks or desktop PCs.

There are four capacities available, including 180GB, 240GB, 360GB, and 480GB ranging in price from $189.99 to $489.99 depending on capacity. Performance also varies by model as detailed by Corsair:

180GB: 555MB/s read, 525MB/s write, 90,000 Max Random 4k Write IOPS

240GB: 555MB/s read, 525MB/s write, 90,000 Max Random 4k Write IOPS

360GB: 555MB/s read, 530MB/s write, 50,000 Max Random 4k Write IOPS

480GB: 540MB/s read, 455MB/s write, 50,000 Max Random 4k Write IOPS

Corsair ran the 240GB model though some tests and posted the results in its blog — they fare quite well as you’d expect. The new Force GS drives include a 3-year limited warranty and will be available immediately from online retailers. Newegg has the 180GB and 360GB versions listed for $175 and $320, respectively.

Source

Micron to buy Elpida, DRAM market left with 3 competitors

Bloomberg brings news from Japan that U.S-based chipmakerMicron Technology will purchase Japanese rival Elpida. This falls in line with a statement made last month by CEO Mark Durcan that Micron would make the purchase, but only if it could avoid stock dilution and the acquisition of too much interest-bearing debt.

Micron is the last major U.S-based maker of memory chips, well known for its brand of Crucial memory and its solid entries into the SSD space. Elpida is a major supplier or memory chips for Apple.

Elpida filed for bankruptcy in February due a perfect storm of falling DRAM prices and Japan's increasingly strong currency, a combination which makes it difficult to export goods which are both profitable and competitively priced.

Micron is said to be paying about 140 billion yen -- or about 1.76 billion dollars -- just to shed a portion of Elpida's debt. The report also claims that Micron will also be investing about 100 billion yen in Elpida's facilities, a shot in the arm which should bolster its ability to crank out DRAM chips.

Micron's absorption of Elpida will leave the global DRAM market with only three competitors: Samsung, Hynix and Micron. Currently, Samsung owns about 41 percent of the market while Hynix comes in a distant second at 24 percent. Both Micron and Elpida weigh in around 12 percent each, meaning their combined total will essentially tie them with Hynix in terms of market volume.

Mainstream SSD prices plummeted nearly 50% in the past year

Finally dipping below the heralded $1 per GB mark, it appears overall SSD prices have been on a precipitous decline over the past year. This observation comes from The Tech Report who analyzed data fromcamelegg.com, a website dedicated to tracking prices at Newegg.

Their overall findings show that Crucial, Corsair, OCZ and Samsung SSDs have been mostly in line with price cuts for their 240GB and 256GB offerings. In many cases, these SSDs have shed more than half their original cost since launch. Meanwhile, 120GB and 128GB SSDs also fell at similar although slightly more modest rates. As of the past week, many 120GB and 128GB SSDs are now hovering under the $120 mark, making them viable alternatives to traditional hard drives for a growing segment of consumers.

Despite the overall trend of falling prices, Intel has continued to treat their SSDs quite differently than competitors. Prices on Intel's drives have come down only slightly and remain stagnant for long periods of time.

Well-known industry vendors like OCZ have typically based their designs on third-party controllers, like those by Sandforce and Marvell. Many of those offerings come in 4-channel and 8-channel configurations with varying numbers of chips, typically in multiples of 8. Intel, on the other hand, is the only company I'm familiar with that offers its own proprietary controller with a 10-channel design. But, even Intel has begun using third-party controllers in some of its SSDs, so maybe we'll see better overall prices from Intel in the future.

Another statistical peculiarity are smaller and monstrously large SSDs. Drives which were 60GB or less are markedly more expensive per gigabyte -- many hit $100 for half the storage of a slightly higher priced 128GB SSDs.

Although The Tech Report doesn't touch on 480GB+ SSDs, some anecdotal price checking reveals that, overall, there is a premium to be paid for solid state drives with unusually high-capacities as well. For now, 128-256GB seems to be the sweet spot.

apanese researchers showcase hybrid SSD using NAND and ReRAM

The technology inside that new solid state drive you just purchased could be obsolete sooner than you think. A group of Japanese researchers have developed ahybrid SSD that uses high-capacity NAND flash memory alongside Resistive Random Access Memory, or ReRAM. The combination could allow future drives to write up to eleven times faster than today’s quickest SSDs.

The research was led by Professor Ken Takeuchi from Chuo University and presented at the 2012 Symposium of VLSI Circuits held in Hawaii. At the event, the group proposed a drive that included 256GB of NAND flash as well as 8 Gbits of ReRAM, the latter of which is used as cache and storage.

In addition to the increased speeds, researchers claim the hybrid drive will reduce power consumption by up to 93 percent. And if that isn’t enough to get you excited, these drives could last far longer than traditional SSDs – nearly seven times longer, to be exact. ReRAM, however, is currently expensive but the price versus longevity factor could reduce overall costs to just 1/7 of today’s drives.

Life of the drive is also extended by reducing the number of writes in the NAND flash. Instead, data is written in the ReRAM about 30 times more often than in NAND flash.

An algorithm called MRU (most recently used) is used to store frequently used data in the ReRAM. By using this method, common data can be read from the drive faster than from NAND flash.

Despite its promise, Neowin concludes that we aren’t likely to see this technology come to consumer-level SSDs anytime soon. The reason for this has to do with the price of ReRAM. If the researchers can significantly lower the overall price (none was mentioned) then things could become much more feasible.

Crucial announces 'Adrenaline' hybrid storage kit with 50GB m4 SSD

Although solid state drives aren't as pricy as they used to be, they're still considered somewhat of a luxury. With some success, manufacturers have attempted to bridge the gap between flash drives and mechanical storage with hybrid solutions such as Intel's Smart Response Technology and Seagate'sMomentus XT drives. Determined to show its rivals how it's done, Crucial has entered the arena with a slightly unique contender that makes it easier to boost the performance of your sluggish hard drive.

The company's new "Adrenaline Solid State Cache" package contains a 50GB m4 SSD, a 3.5-inch adapter and software that caches your most frequently access data. The beauty of this setup is that it doesn't require you to purchase anything other than Adrenaline kit to boost the performance of your existing hard drive. By comparison, the Intel's offering requries an SRT-ready chipset to link cache and storage drives, while the Momentus XT is more of a replacement hard drive with extra cache.

To configure the cache drive, you only have to connect the m4 to your motherboard and power source then boot your machine and install the caching software to link your flash and mechanical drives. The caching application is fully automated, runs in the background and requires no user management, according to Crucial. We haven't seen pricing details, but the m4 occupies the budget end of the market with a 64GB model costing about $110 or $1.72 per gigabyte, about as cheap as you'll find for such a unit. With that in mind, we're hoping the Adrenaline kit is under $90.

OCZ announces Indilinx Everest-based Petrol SSD

OCZ has announced a new 'cost-sensitive' range of solid-state drives based on the Indilinx Everest controller. Dubbed Petrol, the new series features the usual 2.5-inch form factor, a SATA 6.0 Gbps interface, 2xnm asynchronous MLC NAND Flash memory backed by the company's lifespan-enhancing NDurance technology, a MTBF of 1.25 million hours, TRIM support for like-new performance over time, and a three year warranty.

The Petrol SSD Series is said to deliver bandwidth of up 400 MB/s and 35,000 IOPS. Additionally, OCZ says advanced features unique to Indilinx, such as proprietary page mapping algorithms and its latency reduction technology, allow for steady mixed-workload performance and access times as low as 0.06ms.

The OCZ Petrol SSD Series will be available in 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities throughout the company's global channel in the coming weeks. Although there's no mention of prices in the press release, techPowerUp says the drives have been found on pre-order going from $113 to $803.

This is OCZ's second SSD family to utilize the Indilinx Everest platform after it purchased the South Korea-based NAND flash controller maker for $32 million back in March. The first was the high-end Octane SSD, introduced in October, which has read speeds of up to 570 MB/s with up to 45,000 IOPS.

Super Talent unveils SandForce-based TeraNova SSD

Super Talent is taking aim at the enthusiast solid-state drive market this week with the announcement of its new TeraNova SSD. Powered by the SandForce SF-2281 controller and 'optimized' SandForce firmware, the new drives can reportedly hit up to 540MB/s and 520MB/s sequential read and write speeds, respectively.

Super Talent's TeraNova SSD will be available in capacities ranging from 64GB to 480GB. Write speeds vary slightly depending on the size of the drive -- the 64GB is rated at 490MB/s, the 120GB at 510MB/s, the 240GB at 520MB/s, and the 480GB model at 480MB/s -- but read speeds on all of them can reach up to 540MB/s.

The 2.5-inch drive uses the newer SATA III 6Gbps interface and, as you'd expect, it includes common functions such as wear leveling and error correction to ensure reliability as well as data protection in case of sudden power loss. The TeraNova SSD is also backed by a two-year limited warranty.

Super Talent says the new drive will begin shipping today, and though there's no mention of price in the press release Engadget says they'll set you back $109, $179, $365 or a whopping $920 depending on capacity.

The Crucial m4 (Micron C400) SSD Review

Micron Technology announced the RealSSD C400 SSD series yesterday and we had a chance to check out this drive in person today. The current Micron C300 line uses 34nm process technology; the C400 uses 25nm technology, which has enabled Micron to double maximum capacity to 512GB. There are three other capacities available: 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB. All four products stay with the 6Gb/s SATA III interface and use 25nm multi-level cell (MLC) technology. The Micron C400 SSD has a top sequential read speed of 415MB/s and that is 17 percent higher than the C300's peak read speed of 355MB/s. The best sequential write speed is the 512GB C400 is 260MB/s, which is slightly more than 20 percent above the best that the 256GB RealSSD C300 can do. This SSD has impressive numbers, but when we heard that Micron had the drive at Storage Visions we had to stop by and take a look at the drive in person. 

The Micron C400 SSD looks very similar to the original C300 SSD Series as it still uses a Marvell controller and Micron MLC NAND Flash memory. Micron said the controller is a newer revision and that they have placed more IP into the controller to help out performance and the reliability of the drive. Micron also says that they plan on still allowing end user firmware updates that will be non-destructible. Early adopters of the Micron C300 might remember that the first firmware update for the C300 was destructive and all the data on the drive was lost. Micron still cringes when that firmware revision is brought up and said those types of firmware updates are a thing of a past and that having data safe updates is a priority for their SSDs. 

The Micron RealSSD C400 looks the same from the outside and that doesn't make for a very interesting story.  We were able to get Justin Sykes, Director of SSD marketing for Micron Technology to give us a live demo of the new 256GB C400 versus a traditional 5400RPM hard drive in a pair of identical IBM notebook PCs that are fairly common among business travelers. 

The demo shows that the Micron RealSSD C400 is able to boot and a movie and 25 high-definition images in photoshop much quicker than a 5400RPM drive on an identical system. The demo shows you what you can expect from an SSD in the real world. We should mention that the laptops are both running on a SATA II interface which is actually limiting the capability of the C400.

Micron is currently working with notebook manufacturers to qualify its new RealSSD drives under the C400 product name. With samples of the RealSSD C400 drives available now to manufacturers, Micron expects mass production to begin in February. Bringing the drives to business customers and consumers on the retail market will be Crucial, a division of Micron. Crucial will begin selling the portfolio under the name, Crucial m4 SSD. The Crucial m4 SSD product line is expected to be available sometime in the first quarter of 2011. Pricing will be set around the times are released. You can expect a full review of the Micron RealSSD C400 and/or the Crucial m4 SSD in the near future.

Optimize Your SSD

SSD basics SSD is a abbreviation for 'Solid State Drive': a 'drive' with no mechanical parts, but with a conventional disk-interface (usually SATA). An ssd contains memory chips (flash memory) to store the data. The biggest advantage is data is almost immediately available, without the need of moving a mechanical head to the area on the hard drive where the desired data is stored. At this moment pc-components such as the processor, memory (ram), graphics processor and other components, perform well enough to meet the demand of the most users. Still we have to wait while using a computer... So where can performance still be increased dramatically? The answer: ssd's! In 2009 prices of ssd's have dropped by a factor 4. Still at this moment ssd's are much more expensive than hard drives: ssd's now cost around $2.5 per GB, incontrast to approximately $0.1 per GB for conventional hard drives. But, there is such a raise in perfomance! An example of a comparison of a much sold ssd over a very fast hard drive - behold and enjoy: An ssd (Intel X25-M G2 'Postville' 80GB): A fast hard drive (Western Digital Raptor 80GB): An ssd causes starttimes of applications to speed up by a factor 5 to 10: applications often seem to start almost immediately with an SSD. Starting an operating system can be fastened by a factor 2. Do I need SSD tweaks to get my ssd working without problems? No, you don't! An ssd will perform very well from factory, especially compared to a conventional hard disk! So if you do not want to fuss, then skip these tips; they are meant to squeeze that bit more out a ssd than is possible by default, especially for Windows XP and Vista, which does not have advanced support for ssd by themselves. Terminology - Garbage collection: part of the functionallity of the firmware of ssd's that automatically merges fairly unused memory blocks for better performance - Under-partitioning: leave blank space for better performance - Wiping: OCZ method (tool) to improve performance - Aligning: creating a partition with a size that is exactly the cluster size multiplied by a factor - TRIM: a future ATA (contoller) command from the operating system to an ssd, that can tell that a memory block on the ssd can be erased to improve write performance - it will be a standard feature of Windows 7, but SSD's and raid controllers must support it - Wear leveling: spreading write-actions on memory cells evenly over the whole ssd - this prevents wear of the flash cells increasing their liftetime - GB or GiB: Intel specifies a GB as 1000.000.000, and OCZ as 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes (also known as MiB) which is nearly 7.4% more - MLC / SLC: Multi Level Cell or Single Level Cell - the latter lasts longer, is theoretically faster but more expensive, so mlc-based ssd's are now sold more, especially to consumers. Wikipedia: MLC vs. SLC Tips for Linux SSDs and Linux: Tips and Tricks Tips for OS X Mac: SSD or not? Tips for Windows / in general - Partition alignment: yes - Defragmentation: no - Indexing: no - Swapfile on ssd: yes - Under-partitioning: choice of user - Software caching: yes to JMicron, other ssd's: choice of user - Wipe (OCZ): Yes, but not until Windows 7 TRIM raid and support - Raid controller: choice of user - AHCI: preferably enabled Below the explanation in detail - many of these points are applicable to generic SSDs, and not specific to Windows. Partition Alignment Alignment means to create a partition with a size that exactly one whole factor multiplied by the cluster size (eg 4096KB). If the partitions are not 'aligned', one read / write operation from the operating system may in the worst case perform two physical read / writes. Alignment on Windows only works with NTFS partitions. Windows Vista (SP1 and later) and Windows 7 always create alignded partitions. If you want a partition to be alignded when installing Windows XP, use the installation dvd of Vista or Windows 7 just to create the partitions, or use BootIT, or follow one of the many guides on the Internet. And if you want to create and restore an image? If you create an image of your entire ssd and restore it, you lose the alignment with most currently available cloning-software. If you only create an image of a partition and restoring that, the alignment is not lost. Defragmentation Defragmenting an ssd has virtually no effect on performance. Some benchmarks show a small profit, but in practice it is not noticeable. Defragging however performs a huge lot of write operations, so that the lifetime of an ssd can be shortened. Indexing It is tested that indexing a ssd (a feature of the operating system) makes no difference in performance. With Windows 7, indexing automatically turned off when it is detected that an ssd is connected - for other hard drives in the same system the indexing will still be activated. Swap File An operating system can write a lot to a swap file, so when you put a swapfile on your ssd, lifetime can be shortened. But the performance gain however is noticeable, and as long as you have enough memory in your system - and modern memory (DDR2 / DDR3) today is not expensive - your swap file is hardly used. Many people disable the swap file by hand (often they use 4GB ram or more), especially when using an ssd. Under Partitioning Some SLC ssd's such as the Intel X25-E series, contain more flash memory than that can be partitioned. Thus the firmware has more free memory blocks to write to, which significantly boosts performance. It has been tested whether this trick can also be used on other ssd's, and that works! When you create a partition with approximately 90% of the maximum size of the ssd, the performance will stay much more consequent even when the partition gets full. You 'throw away' some space however. And probably it is not necessary to use this tweak in the future, when Windows 7 and the ssd's support the TRIM command. Caching By default operating systems turn on software caching (also called write-back caching) for hard drives and thus also for ssd's. This is fine, and there is no reason to turn it off. Better still: for ssd's with a Jmicron controller it is a must! Wiping For OCZ ssd's there is a tool called the Wiper tool. You can download this from the OCS website. This empties unused memory blocks and removes them from the address table, so that they are available for optimal write speed. Although the firmware of OCZ ssd's has improved to include garbage collection algorithms, wiping is still advisable. Note that this is not always infallible: sometimes data corruption has been reported in x64 versions of Windows when using this tool. You can also Wiper.exe scheduling so that every day / night / week / month takes place! Wiping is probably not necessary any more when Windows 7 is used with the TRIM command set. There is also a garbage collection tool from OCZ, but with the latest firmware with built-in garbage collection that is no longer needed. Using a raid controller A decent ssd is already much faster than a regular hard drive, but some users have good reasons to put ssd's in a raid configuration, such as professional or server applications.  Here is a nice example of a lot of ssd's in raid: Samsung SSD Awesomeness. A warning: the OCZ wiper tool most often can not be used when ssd's are used in raid, because most raid controllers do not support the commands that are sent by that tool. Result is that performance degradation occurres in raid-configs, and that while the whole point is increasing the performance with a raid-configuration. When Windows 7 is used, and an ssd and the used raid controller support the TRIM command, this problem will be of the past. AHCI AHCI is a comprehensive command set for SATA, and includes NCQ (Native Command Queing).  Initially, the assumption was that NCQ would not have impact on SSDs.  But wow it's proven that certain AHCI-features do work, as tested here. So enable AHCI (sometimes called 'advanced' at the SATA controller settings) in the computer's bios. Warning: with XP you should use an sata driver floppy when AHCI is enabled, or you can use nLite to slipstream the AHCI driver to the Windows XP installation disc. Windows Vista and Windows 7 would carry more AHCI drivers on the installation-dvd's, and otherwise you can use a usb stick instead of a floppy to install the sata driver. Model-specific tips For systems with an Intel chipset with Intel Matrix Storage raid controller: note the way to connect your SATA ports on the motherboard. Booting delays were encountered when SATA1 and SATA2 for respectively the ssd and the harddrive were used. If the ssd was put on SATA 1, the harddive on SATA3 and a dvd burner on SATA5, there was no problem. Choosing an ssd Models with a Indilinx controller (OCZ many models, but also the Super Talent Ultra Drive Me and other brands) or models with Intel's controller (X25 and X18 series) are fine, nothing to complain about. The choice between Intel and Indilinx depends on where you most want the ssd to use. Intel provides faster read and write speeds for large amounts of small files, but the Indilinx controller can better handle large files and thus has higher sequential read performance. Also for random access to large files such as databases, the Intel ssd's are better. You notice this for example in Apple OS X's Spotlight feature to search your files, or when reading metadata from iPhoto or Mail. Models with Samsung controller (such as Samsung's own ssd's or some OCZ models) are also recommended, though the read-write speeds are lower. Ssd's with a JMicron controller however (OCZ and Kingston models) have initially caused much disappointment and frustration. Meanwhile the firmware of ssd's with a JMicron controller have been improved, but because people are very reluctant buying an ssd with a JMicron controller, it will take a while until the appreciation for those ssd's will improve.

How-To: Optimize Your Windows Profile and Media Storage with a SSD

SSDs are all the rage for performance-oriented builders these days, but they aren’t without problems. Even the largest solid state drive is too small to hold all the stuff we need to store on the C: drive—games, photos, music, videos, etc.—and the inexpensive models max out at around 64GB of capacity. And there’s the performance problem, to boot. All but the most expensive SSDs suffer from very slow write speeds, which can have a significant impact on your real-world performance.

So what’s the solution? We’re going to show you how to set up your Windows install like a Linux setup—with the OS and primary apps on the SSD, and your user profile and space-hogging games on a traditional hard disk. This gives us the best of both worlds—the folders we write to most frequently are on a traditional disk, while our boot and app load times can benefit greatly from the fast read speed and low random-access time of an SSD. Best of all, you can use even a tiny 64GB SSD without having to constantly manage disk space—picking and choosing which apps and media will be stored on the small drive.

Step 1: Install Windows on Your SSD

While you can change the default path of your user profile using the Windows Pre-Install Kit, it’s more trouble than it’s worth to do it that way. Instead, we’re going to tweak Windows after it’s already in place. The first thing you’ll need to do is install Windows on your SSD, which is essentially no different than any other time you’ve installed Windows. When you’re prompted to create an account at the end of the install, don’t use the account name you actually want; use a temporary placeholder instead. You’ll create the actual account you’ll use later. Don’t install any applications until after you’ve moved your user profile.

Once Windows is installed, you should create the user account you intend to use. Go to the Control Panel and search for Add User. Create your account, but don’t log in yet.

We’ve tested our procedure with Windows Vista and Windows 7 Beta 1, but it should work with XP as well if you adjust the paths yourself (Vista and Windows 7 store user profile in C:\Users by default, XP is C:\Documents and Settings). Once Windows is installed and updated with drivers and security patches, you’ll need to set up the partitions on your hard disk.

We created two partitions on our hard disk, one for the user profile and one for games and other large applications. To access the partitioning tools, right-click Computer in the Start Menu and click Manage. Go to Disk Management. Then, right-click your hard disk and create a new partition. We made each partition roughly half of the drive, but if you have a lot of media files, you may want to make your user profile partition larger than your game partition. Once the two partitions have been formatted as NTFS, you can continue to the next step.

Step 2: Copy Your Profiles

Next, you’ll want to assign a drive letter to your user profile drive. We chose U:\, but you can use whatever letter you prefer. In U:\, you’ll need to create a folder called Users. Now, reboot your computer and go into Safe Mode by pressing F8 as it boots. Once you’re in Safe Mode, go to C:\Users and copy the Default and Public folders to U:\Users\Default and U:\Users\Public. You’ll likely find some *.tmp files that simply won’t copy; it’s OK to skip them.

 

After that’s done, you should open the registry editor (press the Windows key on your keyboard and type regedit). Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList. In that folder, you need to change the value of the Default key to U:\Users\Default, the Public key to U:\Users\Public, and the ProfilesDirectory to U:\Users. Reboot your PC and log in using the account you created in step 1. During the login, Windows will create your new user account, which should be in U:\Users.

Step 3: Wrapping up Loose Ends

If you didn’t take our advice in step 1 and start with a clean install, this is the point at which you should copy the contents of your old user profile into your new directory. Rather than doing a wholesale copy/paste of the whole directory, it’s safer to only pull the files you need.

You’ll also want to open the registry and do a Find for C:\Users. We found about 20 instances on our test machines, even in a fresh account. While there are some tools that will do an automatic find and replace on the registry, we chose to manually use regedit so we could verify each change ourselves. Open regedit (type regedit after pressing the Windows key), click Computer at the top of the left pane, and then go to the Edit menu and click Find. Type C:\Users and click Find. Then manually change each key to U:\Users. Press F3 to find the next instance, and keep at it until you've changed all the entries. Reboot your PC, then restart regedit and search one final time to ensure you didn't miss any entries.

If you're doing this on a machine that's been used, there will likely be a massive number of registry changes necessary. In that case, download Registry Finder (www.acelogix.com/regfinder.html, 30-day trial) to automate some of the process. While it’s not perfect, Registry Finder will find and change many of the entries for you. You'll still want to do a manual search with regedit, but Registry Finder could save you an hour of copy/pasting.

At this point, you could delete C:\Users if you so desire. We find that it's better to leave the folder, so that even poorly behaved apps that use a hardcoded profile path will continue to work. You should, however, occasionally check the C:\Users folder to see if any files have popped up there.

At this point, your Windows install is ready to go. However, before you install any big apps, you should mount your games partition so you don't waste precious space on the SSD for games.

Step 4: Create a Place for Games

Now, we're going to mount your games partition in the file system. First, you create a folder in your C:\Program Files directory (or C:\Program Files (x86) on 64-bit Windows) called Games. Go back to the Computer Management console and click Disk Management. Right-click the Games partition and select Change Drive Letter and Paths. Select any drive letters that are currently being used and click Remove, then click Add. Select "Mount in the following empty NTFS folder", and browse to the Games folder you just created. Now anything you install at C:\Program Files\Games will actually be stored on your hard disk, and not your SSD. Paths and permissions will also be inherited. Be sure not to mount your Games folder to any additional drives.

OWC launches 6Gbps replacement SSD for MacBook Air

Other World Computing has announced the release of the 6G Mercury Aura Pro Express, a replacement SSD for the 2011 MacBook Air that fully utilizes its SATA 3 (6Gbps) interface. Available in 120GB and 240GB capacities, the new drives combine a SandForce 2200-series controller with Tier 1/Grade A NAND memory to achieve up to 507MB/s read speeds and 454MB/s write speeds, which is about twice as fast as the stock drive in MBAs.

Apple ships its current MacBook Airs with SATA 3Gbps SSDs and doesn't promote SATA 6Gbps even though the hardware supports it. Since the ultra thin and light notebook uses a nonstandard SSD form factor, the typical 2.5-inch drives on the market can't be used as a replacement. OWC says that the new Aura Pro Express 6G SSD is the first and only 6Gbps SSD designed to work with both the 11.1-inch and 13.3-inch models of the new MacBook Air.

In addition, according to the company, it provides up to 100 times the data protection of an ordinary SSD by combining the highest level of Error Correction Code and SandForce RAISE technology, along with 7 percent overprovisioning.

The drive is available now at around $345 and $600 for the 120GB and 240GB models, respectively. A 480GB capacity model for the 2011 MacBook Air is supposedly planned but no date has been announced.

Kingston starts shipping SandForce-based HyperX SSD Review

Kingston Digital has started shipping the HyperX solid-state drive (SSD), its first SATA 3.0 6Gb/s SSD. Featuring the latest SandForce controller, the Kingston HyperX SSD is aimed at enthusiasts, gamers, and performance users.

The HyperX line is available in 120GB and 240GB capacities. Both ship as a standalone SSD (includes HyperX branded 2.5" to 3.5" desktop mounting plate) or as a bundle with the HyperX Upgrade Kit (includes Acronis True Image HD migration software, desktop mounting plate, external drive bay, multi-head screwdriver, and SATA data cable).

Here is the official lineup, including US pricing as it appears on Amazon.com, Buy.com, Newegg.com, and TigerDirect.com: 120GB stand-alone SSD for $270 (SH100S3/120G), 120GB HyperX Bundle Kit for $285 (SH100S3B/120G), 240GB HyperX Stand-alone SSD for $520 (SH100S3/240G), and 240GB HyperX Bundle Kit for $540 (SH100S3B/240G).

Announced less than two months ago, the new drives use the same SandForce SF-2281 controllers found on the Vertex 3 and are rated for a sequential read and write throughput of 525MB/s and 480MB/s, respectively, with sustained random 4K read/write of 20,000 / 60,000 IOPS on the 120GB model and 40,000 / 60,000 IOPS on the 240GB model. The drives are built using premium Intel 25nm Compute NAND (P/E 5K).

Other features also include TRIM and SMART support, advanced wear-leveling technology, and user configurable over provisioning. Additionally, the drives are backed by a three-year warranty and 24/7 support.

Originally, the HyperX SSD was supposed to arrive in stores by the end of July. It appears there was a bit of a delay, but thankfully it wasn't a major one.