Happens to even the best of us.  Last week, I had an SSD crash of my main PC and shortly after learned that my back-up wasn’t going to work and my secondary back-up set me back 2-years.  Considering my love of photography and all things digital, that was a MASSIVE loss.  Sitting right beside my PC was SanDisk’s newest SanDisk …

Without a doubt, the most costly criminal loss to society today is through data loss.  Billions doesn’t accurately reflect the total loss worldwide and, as a matter of fact, we are certain that there would be a single instance where more than a billion dollars of return has moved through a single criminals crypto account.  And nobody is immune.  From …

One of the constants that has come to mind as a photographer over the years is finding perfect storage for my media.  Admittedly, I still do something I don’t really approve of which is storing media on my system drive and this is only thanks to Sabrent and their choice to market 4/8TB drives for this purpose.  I have also …

Without a doubt, the loudest a reader can be in the SSD world is when a company dares to switch hardware in their SSDs without telling anyone.  This goes back years and, well, few have escaped the wrath of online ridicule when they are caught doing such. I have always been the bad guy and still believe that manufacturers have …

Gen 4 SSDs have become common place as of late and manufacturers have elected to rely on the Phison E18 PCIe 4.0 NVMe controller, and for good reason.  It is a top tier controller with performance that provides 7GB/s throughput and over 1 million IOPS and, most recently, we even identified an SSD with this controller as being a ‘game …

An unexpected surprise arrived at our offices this Christmas break in the guise of a PCIe 4.0 DRAM-less SSD.  It was only a matter of time but there has been some clever thought put into this drive.  It is the ADATA XPG Atom 50 Gen 4 SSD and two things that stand out are that it is a single-sided SSD, …

One of the oldest names in SSDs is Kingston.  One might not expect such as Kingston, by all sense of the term, is a third party manufacturer…or distributor.  Unlike Samsung, WD/SanDisk, Intel, Kioxia, Micron, SKHynix and a few others, they do not actually own a fab that ‘grows’ the silicon ingots to manufacture NAND wafers.  Unbelievably, the original Kingston SSDNow …

On our test Bench today is the Silicon Power XD80 PCIe 3.0 NVMe M.2 SSD.  It is a 2TB capacity and claims to bring us top Gen 3 speeds with a lower price point and at lower temperatures, 20% lower actually.  The XD80 comes with its own metal heatsink attached, something we really never saw with many Gen 3 SSDs.  …

So I was in a conversation this week where many were speaking of the success of the Phison E18 controller and I stepped away from the crowd for a bit and had to ask, “Yes but will this last?”  Historically, we have watched different SSD companies, and more specifically, third party SSD controller companies step into the limelight with a …

Mushkin has introduced a new SSD and it is a PCIe 4.0 SSD, aptly named the Mushkin Gamma.  The Mushkin Gamma is based on the ever popular Phison E18 NVMe Gen 4 controller and reaches speeds above 7GB/s.  Since the introduction of PCIe 4.0 some time ago, we have really seen three levels of Gen 4, these being low power …