SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash storage solutions, today announced the new SanDisk Ultra II SSD with enhanced SSD Dashboard. The new drive is designed to deliver a cost-effective and easy upgrade solution for PC owners looking to improve performance, battery life, and power efficiency. The enhanced SSD Dashboard provides visibility into the drive's performance, security, and available firmware updates, to maintain peak performance at all times.

"We live in an era where we expect to have information at our fingertips anytime, anywhere, with technology that keeps us connected to both our personal and work lives on devices that won't fail," said Dinesh Bahal, vice president of retail product marketing at SanDisk. "The new SanDisk Ultra II SSD, together with the improved SSD Dashboard, provides consumers with an easy, affordable way to ensure that their PC can keep pace with their increasingly connected, information-driven lifestyle."

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To commemorate the 10th anniversary of its My Passport line of portable external hard drives, WD, a Western Digital company, is introducing a sleek new design for the world’s most popular external hard drive lines. More than 60 million My Passport drives have been sold in the past 10 years, providing approximately 42,000 petabytes of content protection for consumers worldwide. The My Passport Ultra - Metal Edition drive and My Passport Ultra - Anniversary Edition drive represent a decade of refinement for WD’s enduring portable drive line. They feature elegant metal exteriors, up to 2 TB capacities in smaller enclosures, content protection, including backup, and cloud integration for anywhere access to personal content.

The My Passport Ultra – Metal Edition and Anniversary Edition drives incorporate a unique and innovative radial-spin-design aluminum enclosure, which provides attractive styling and extra protection against the everyday knocks experienced in the hands of today’s mobile consumer. In addition, the drive offers users hardware encryption and password protection to prevent unauthorized use of the drive in the event of loss or theft. For additional content protection and remote sharing, the My Passport Ultra - Metal Edition drive includes WD SmartWare Pro software with Dropbox integration, allowing users to back up content from their computer to the drive and from the drive to the cloud, and retrieve content from their Dropbox account to the My Passport drive. These features make the My Passport drive an ideal choice for backing up, protecting, storing and enjoying digital content on the go.

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AMD today announced a new technology partnership with OCZ Storage Solutions – A Toshiba Group Company, for AMD Radeon-branded Solid State Drives (SSDs). Starting today, users can purchase the AMD Radeon™ R7 Series SSDs in 120GB, 240GB or 480GB capacities from their favorite online retailers.

The AMD Radeon™ R7 Series SSDs are an excellent choice for gamers looking to upgrade their system’s overall responsiveness with an economical solution that puts performance and reliability front and center.

“The AMD Radeon™ brand is synonymous with performance and quality amongst PC gamers,” said Roman Kyrychynskyi, director of memory, AMD. “With the new AMD Radeon™ R7 Series SSDs powered by outstanding OCZ Storage Solutions IP, we bring that reputation to the SSD market with a series of drives that offer an ideal combination of performance, reliability and affordability—great for gamers building or upgrading a rig.”

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CDRLabs kicks off the week with a review of Samsung's 256GB 850 PRO SSD. First unveiled at the 2014 Samsung SSD Global Summit in Seoul, the 850 PRO is ideal for use in high-end PCs and workstations. The drive is powered by Samsung's own 3-core MEX controller and is available with up to 1TB of their second generation, 32-layer 3D V-NAND flash. The 850 PRO also supports Device Sleep (DEVSLP) for lower power consumption as well as self-encrypting drive (SED) technology that is TCG Opal 2.0 and IEEE-1667 compliant. To top it all off, it supports Samsung's RAPID (Real-time Accelerated Processing of I/O Data) technology. By using free PC memory as a cache, RAPID can push the performance of the SSD beyond the limits of the current SATA specification.