SONY ULTRABOOK PRO 13 CONFIGURATIONS DIFFER A few weeks back, we published our review of the Sony VAIO Pro 13 ultrabook where we discovered that there were two different configurations of the VAIO being shipped, that with a SATA 3 M.2 SSD and that with a native M.2 PCIe SSD.  Not only did the system that we received contain a …

A few weeks back, we posted an article that stated our opinion of the new Apple MBA as being one of the top ultraportable laptops available today, and quite possibly, untouchable.  The backlash from Sony fans was amazing, many clearly noting that we hadn’t tested, or included, the new VAIO 13 Pro as a comparison system in that report…and they …

We never imagined the popularity of Sony laptops until we posted a totally unrelated article about the 2013 MBA being the best ultra in the world earlier this week.  It seems that resulted in a flurry of e-mails questioning why the new Vaio Pro 13 wasn’t included in our analysis of the top Ultras money can buy.  Who knew?  After …

Sony’s new VIAO touchscreen T14 arrived last week, complete with hybrid hard drive and Windows 8.  Frequent readers of TSSDR understand my opinion of both, an opinion that was initially hard to contain with their teaming up in what appears to be an attractive ultra design. Swapping out the hard drive for an SSD was a given. Stepping outside the …

A few days ago, we released our review of the Intel SSD DC P3700 NVMe SSD.  This new entry to the enterprise market brought in just under 500K IOPS in a single PCB and single controller design package, a design not needing the traditional RAID solution to achieve performance above 2.5GB/s.  As much attention as it gained from the enterprise …

Our visit with Marvell this week at Computex went as expected and we got a bit of an update on their Altaplus M.2 PCIe X4 controller, previously designated as the Altaplus and numbered 88SS9293.  Timing right now for Marvell is great as Q4 is going to be a key point in time for M.2 X4 release.  LSI expects that the …

Normally we might elect to post availability of a product, but for the number of e-mails received after our review of the Samsung XP941 PCIe X4 M.2 SSD in September of 2013. At that time, we  learned that Samsung had shut down distribution of the XP941 to all 3rd party resellers right after our report, a result of demand exceeding …

Having had a few days to sit back and reflect on this year’s CES experience, I would have to say that it was totally unexpected.  Certainly the number of companies showing off solid state devices has dropped significantly, but of those that remained, some very exciting prototypes were front and center.  If I were to look ahead just a bit, …

I had almost thought I might never see it and truly can’t stand by what might happen down the road, but Samsung had their ‘pre-production’ Series 9 ultrabook on display at Pepcom with it’s own Samsung XP941 PCIe M.2 SSD, performing at 1GB/s.  To those not familiar with Samsung, they value their business relationships dearly and the XP941 PCIe SSD …

So I am a few thousand miles above beautiful California and the 2013 LSI Accelerating Innovations Summit. I can’t help but reflect on the confusion that still exists concerning the standardization of M.2 SSDs, regardless of how many times we try to explain this in our reports (1, 2, 3).  If you are confused and not an industry professional, don’t …