Today Intel held a memory and storage event to announce their latest product and we were there to get the inside scoop on what that is, Optane DC Persistent Memory. Optane DC Persistent Memory is a new storage tier that puts Intel Optane memory onto a DIMM to get it closer to the CPU and this has opened up all kinds of …

In December of 2017, we got to take a look at Crucial’s latest SATA SSD, the MX500. With a superb mix of performance, features, accessories, price, and warranty the MX500 earned our Top Value award with ease. There really wasn’t anything holding it back except for maybe one thing, availability. At the time of writing, only the 1TB 2.5″ form factor …

There are three constants evident in the storage industry in recent years, these being increased performance, increased capacity and lower pricing.  We could probably include such things as product build quality and warranty in this, however, those three features traditionally have made up that golden triangle.  The consumer wants value. They need a higher capacity and with media quality and …

Toshiba is utilizing the 2018 Open Compute Project (OCP) U.S. Summit to announce general availability of their new KumoScale™ storage software for cloud applications.  This new NVMe-oF™ (NVM Express™ over Fabrics) shared accelerated storage software enables the use of NVMe-oF to make flash storage accessible over a data center network, providing a simplified, flexible abstraction of physical disks into a …

Toshiba Memory America is announcing expansion of its portfolio of SSDs for data centers with the addition of new PCIe NVMe and SATA SSDs that feature Toshiba BiCS FLASH 64-layer TLC 3D NAND in several form factors.  Their new CD5, XD5 and HK6-DC SSDs provide robust performance and reliability for read-intensive usage scenarios such as streaming media, big data analytics …

It has been some time now since Intel introduced VROC (Virtual RAID on CPU) and VROC provides for a capability on our motherboards that all would have hoped to see some time ago; the ability to create a bootable RAID configuration.   At the consumer and enthusiast level, VROC is only available in newer X299 chipset motherboards at present, and these …

If you are in touch with storage technology at all, Intel Optane will be familiar to you and, in fact, we have even gone so far as to describe it as a ‘game changer’ or ‘disruptive technology’ in a previous report.  If you are not ‘up to spec’ on the ins and outs of storage, let’s just say that SSDs …

Today we are going to take a close look at the Plextor M8V. Just like the top of the line Plextor M9Pe we just reviewed last week, this new value-oriented SSD from Plextor promises to come into the market guns blazing. It is filled with Toshiba’s BiCS3 TLC NAND and powered by an SMI 2258 controller. Together this combo can easily …

Sonnett Technolgies is announcing that they have begun shipping a new 1TB version of their popular Fusion™ Thunderbolt™ 3 PCIe Flash Drive.  This is a ruggedized and pocket-sized solid-state storage device (SSD) that utilizes a Thunderbolt 3 interface and leverages the 40Gb/s bandwidth of Thunderbolt 3 to deliver sequential read speeds of up to 2600MB/s, and sequential write speeds of …

Catch lines are everything.  If you are reading this, that title has done its job and it’s now in my hands to keep you here.  My name is Les Tokar and I am an SSD Reviewer.  I have worked in flash media since it rolled out to the public ten years ago and have written extensively on SSDs to the …