Hardware

The ability to upgrade storage in today’s smartphones seems to have become key once again. It is the dividing point between Samsung and Apple.  A Samsung S7 smart phone allows the user to add up to 200GB of storage space whereas the Apple iPhone 6S tops out at 128GB, that storage increasing the iPhone price by several hundred dollars. This …

A great indication of how far we have come in flash technology lies in flash drives themselves, where we see today’s flash drives capable of transfer speeds of yesterday’s solid state drives.   While the difference between the two is still vast, the advance of USB versions has seen us move from 35MB/s with USB 2.0 to over 20x that with …

Another product that we were introduced to at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show was the Lexar Professional UHS-II Class 10 U3 microSDXC card. This microSDXC card was designed with the sole purpose of replacing any microSD card you are currently using in any tablet, smartphone, drone, or action camera. WHAT IS SDXC? – SD CARD PERFORMANCE First, there are a …

We have in our hot little hands this morning the Samsung T3 2TB Portable SSD and it is pretty amazing to think that this product contains storage space that most could never come close to filling.  Mind you, if you had use for the storage of a half million songs, or a few million books, 170 million word documents, or …

One interesting aspect of CES is encountering new entrants into certain product categories, such as is the case with Unirex Memory. Unirex Memory is a California-based company that has recently launched their line of Unirex Digital Memory products that include Micro SD cards and Micro SD cards with adaptors, SD Cards, Micro SD cards with USB readers, flash memory USBs, …

Without a doubt, the most common downfall of SD cards is the lack of understanding the consumer has with respect to class levels.  Most buy cards for price only, not realizing how this might benefit them at times when they are really pushing their camera to its limits.  The demands of today’s newest cameras, and even today’s smartphones capable of …

A short time ago, Kingston sent us their newest HyperX Savage USB 3.1 128GB flash drive for report and we have been doing a bit of testing to see if it makes spec.  Most importantly, it is a USB 3.1 Gen1 flash drive which means it is the newer version of USB 3.0 with SuperSpeed, and it is still only …

One of the big marketing points for SSDs, besides their shear speed, is their low power consumption compared to their mechanical rivals. SSDs are not only more power efficient during workloads, but they are able to read and write so quick, that most of the time they are in an idle state. Not only that, but when they are in …

There is no question that 2015 will be the year of NVMe and we are about to see storage performance increase like it never before has.  Where yesterday several SAS enterprise SSDs would be necessary to reach 5GB/s transfer speed, it is now possible with a single SSD with the inevitability of 1 million IOPS becoming a common performance variable …

Samsung recently announced three rather unique and attractive USB 3 flash drives that are now making their entry into the consumer storage market.  They are similar in most features and performance, but differ in that they seem to approach different segments of the flash drive market. Two of these are named the FIT and DUO, while the other is simply …