Hot Hardware - At this time last year, USB 2.0 hard drives were all the rage. Just 12 months later, and now a whole bunch of new external HDDs have USB 3.0 support. And it's about time! Throughout the year, we have wondered why laptop and desktop makers weren't supporting USB 3.0 with any real frequency. Even today, loads of new notebooks are shipping with one (or none) USB 3.0 ports. We realize that not every USB peripheral will need to take advantage of the extra speed (mice and keyboards come to mind), but since they're backwards compatible, we see no real reason not to load up on them.
Maximum PC: You probably haven't given much thought to upgrading your tablet PC's built-in storage, primarily because your hands are tied. If you need more storage, you can buy a microSD card (if your tablet supports it), use an external USB storage device (again, if your tablet supports it), or tap into the cloud. But what if you could swap out the built-in SSD for a faster, more capacious model? That's wishful thinking at the moment, but if companies like Super Talent keep releasing performance-oriented mSATA drives, perhaps tablet makers will take notice.
Maximum PC: Solid state drives (SSDs) are rather simple devices that you plug into your PC and fill with data. Not all SSDs are created equal, however, and Super Talent's latest twist on flash based storage is a dual-interface design. In addition to a SATA II interface, Super Talent's new UltraDrive MX2 SSDs also feature a mini-USB connection. What's the point? To make upgrading easy, Super Talent says.
Anand Tech - SuperTalent are so confident in their speeds that they have teamed up with Ceedo, to provide Ceedo Personal at a reduced cost. The Ceedo Personal application allows the user to install any Windows applications onto the portable drive, and these applications can then be used on any compatible Windows PC, saving all the unique settings that user is accostomed to. We tried out the software on a couple of systems, having no issues on one, and a few quirks on the other.
WOW 500GB of USB3.0 for $99 is pretty good in my book.