Hardware

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 …

A little over a year ago we were able to take a close look at a new breed of SD cards thanks to SanDisk releasing the world’s first UHS-II SD card, the SanDisk Extreme Pro. The standard was so new, besides the Fujifilm XT-1, no other camera even supported the form factor at the time. In September Lexar finally released …

Something that many never think about until it is too late with their memory cards, is just what they might endure in the course of their lifetime.  Whether it be going through airport x-ray equipment, inadvertent drops in the toilet, unexpected drops or the inevitable waterproof camera that isn’t completely waterproof, we can only lose our digital memories once.  Once …

Big data is BIG. We create billions of gigabytes of data on a daily basis, from uploading a photo to Facebook or emailing a new project document, all this data is stored in data centers across the globe. Big data is usually divided between high performance and storage. While SSDs are much faster and help to greatly accelerate the analytics …

The biggest roadblock in moving mainstream consumers from hard drives to SSDs is that of migration.  It seems like such a difficult process when one has to do anything related to opening up a PC and switching out a hard drive for a SSD, never mind having to understand the instructions to migrate the system in the first place. We …