plextor

LAS VEGAS--Plextor has more news in regard to its SSD development to share at CES 2013, in addition to introducing the M5 Pro Xtreme drive.

The storage vendor unveiled a few new solid-state storage devices today, including the M5M mSATA SSD, a Next Generation Form Factor (NGFF) SSD, and its new embedded multimedia card (eMCC).

The M5M mSATA is a 6Gbps SSD. The new drive has no outer casing and is just one-eighth the size of a standard 2.5-inch drive, designed especially for ultrabooks with limited space. It features the new Marvell 88SS9187 controller, and Toshiba's new 19nm … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Plextor just added a touch of "extreme" to its existing M5 Pro solid-state drive.

The storage vendor demoed the M5 Pro Xtreme SSD at CES 2013, as a replacement for the M5 Pro that was released just five months ago. The new drive is on the same lines as the previous model, from the housing to the available capacities, which are 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB.

The only thing that's different, which is also the most important thing, is the performance. The new drive now offers, for the first time among consumer-grade SSDs, random read and write … Read more

Fans of the Plextor M5 Pro, prepare to fall in love again! Showcased at CES 2013, its successor, the Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme, is not just faster, it also costs slightly less.

Other than the fact there's no included USB-SATA adapter, which very few SSDs come with, the new M5 Pro Xtreme has nothing else for me to complain about.

If you're looking to replace your computer's existing main storage device, be it a hard drive or a budget SSD, the Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme is an excellent buy, ranking near the top among the best internal drives to date.… Read more

The Plextor M3 is the second solid-state drive (SSD) from Plextor I've reviewed, and it's quite different from the previous M2 drive.

While the two drives look essentially the same, share the support for the SATA 3 (6Gbps) standard and have a 2.5-inch, 9.5mm standard design, the M3 is not really the next straight step from the M2, but rather a totally different step.

This is because the new drive is actually slightly slower than the previous model, which, by the way, is still one of the fastest on the market. To make up for this, … Read more

No matter how big or small your computer is, there is at least one internal drive to host its operating system and programs. This drive is almost always a standard internal drive, which comes in the form of a regular hard drive (HDD) or a solid-state drive (SSD). The former is affordable and offers lots of storage space, while the latter is generally more expensive but superfast. The good news is, 2012 marked the time SSDs became more and more popular, thanks to the reduced costs and the increased number of vendors joining the storage market of this type.

That … Read more

Relatively expensive flash memory keeps the cost of SSDs much higher than I'd prefer, but competition keeps everyone honest, so I'm glad to see Plextor announce its M3 Pro line of solid-state drives.

These 2.5-inch models, with a slim 7mm height suitable for thin notebooks, will ship in February in capacities of 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB, the Japanese component maker said at CES this week. It didn't disclose pricing.

The new models step up from the existing MS3 products in data-transfer speed, the prime reason most folks pay the price premium and sacrifice the capacity compared … Read more

The network storage market has just gotten a little larger. Plextor, a maker of optical drives, announced Monday its first NAS server, the PX-NAS2.

According to Plextor, this is a dual-bay NAS server that works with both Macs and PCs and is designed for home and small office environments. The server can house up to two SATA hard drives, with a total storage space of up to 4TB.

The company says the new NAS server is DLNA-compliant and has the capability to upload photos and videos to the social sites such as Flickr or YouTube. It comes with auto backup … Read more

Though Toshiba has bowed out of the format race, there're still about 1.5 million HD DVD movies already on the market. This means you can't just ignore them all together. For this reason, it's good news for consumers today that Plextor announced two new internal Blu-ray drives that also read HD DVD.

The first drive--the PX-B920SA--is a Blu-ray recorder capable of recording BD-R media up to 4x (18MB/sec) and BD-RE media up to 2x. The second drive--the PX-B300SA--doesn't have Blu-ray recording capability.

Both drives can read Blu-Ray media up to 4.8x and HD … Read more

I haven't watched more than two minutes of NBA basketball--playoffs not included--since Michael Jordan retired (that'd be the second of his three retirements, in 1998). Then I got a HDTV last year and suddenly found myself tuning in for entire halves of meaningless regular season games--three-quarters of the game if Steve Nash was involved.

If you're hooked on high-definition professional basketball, there's another way to catch all the action without upgrading your TV or cable box. Throw a $99 tuner/antenna kit in your laptop bag and you can watch over-the-air HDTV no matter where you … Read more