This week in our look at miscellaneous product releases and announcements, we bring tidings from Adata, Enermax, Mushkin, and Thermaltake.
- Adata surges into solid state drives for servers. That alliterative headline is about the SX100L, Adata’s very first enterprise SSD, which is coming out in a 2.5" form factor with a choice of 100GB and 200GB capacities. The drive features a five-year warranty and a mean-time-between-failures rating of 1.5 million hours. (That’s around 170 years, for those keeping track.) Adata touts the drive’s static wear-leveling technology, enhanced power-loss protection, and customizable over-provisioning adjustment. It quotes top sequential read and write speeds of 560MB/s and 340MB/s, respectively. Peak IOPS are 73,000 and 45,000, respectively, for 4KB random reads and writes.
- Enermax releases a leader of the midtower case segment – the Coenus. I don’t know about the whole "leader of the midtower case segment" thing, but the Coenus certainly looks like a well-rounded PC case. It has seven 3.5" drive bays, four of which can accommodate 2.5" drives. There are six fan emplacements, two of which (at the front and rear) are populated with 120-mm spinners out of the box. Enermax leaves 30 mm (1.2") of clearance behind the motherboard tray for cable routing, and it includes dual USB 3.0 ports at the front. I’m not totally sold on the looks, but hey—different strokes, and so on.
- Mushkin begins shipping new line of 1.8-inch Chronos(TM) Go Deluxe SATA III solid-state drives. These puppies are rolling out in 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB flavors. Mushkin says the Chronos series was originally meant to cater to enterprise users, and it’s been "adapted and re-engineered to deliver the highest possible storage capacity in a drive that is optimized for high-performance and ultimate reliability, even in the most demanding 24×7 environments." Unfortunately, the press release doesn’t go into a whole lot of extra detail, and the drives aren’t listed on the company’s website yet. I can’t imagine they’re very different from the larger, 2.5" Chronos Deluxe offerings, though.
- Thermaltake Urban series — Urban S71 sophisticated satisfaction. Urban cases are so sophisticated that, apparently, Thermaltake couldn’t stand to launch them all in one go. Instead, we’ve been treated to multiple announcements this month. Oh well. The Urban S71 looks an awful lot like last week’s S41 model, down to the brushed aluminum front panel and noise-dampening foam (on the non-windowed version). The S71 has three optical drive bays, six hard-drive bays, dual USB 3.0 ports, dual USB 2.0 ports, and a 2.5"/3.5" docking station at the top. Cooling is handled by two fans—two 200-mm spinners at the front and a 120-mm "turbo fan" at the rear—and there are dust filters all over the place to ensure cleanliness. If you’re so inclined, you can also cram a 240-mm radiator and an EATX motherboard into this thing. Not too shabby.
Yeah. I’m a little mad at Thermaltake for spamming press releases, but I can’t deny it: those Urban enclosures look good. I’m a big fan of the positive-pressure cooling design, too. The Urban’s behemoth 200-mm fans sit right at the front, behind filters, to ensure dust isn’t sucked in through the other nooks and crannies.
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