Our SSD Reviews

While attending Computex in Taiwan this past June, The SSD Review had the opportunity to meet with Exascend CEO and Founder Frank Chen, who provided valuable insight into the company’s background and philosophy. Exascend is a NAND flash storage specialty manufacturer with a product portfolio that spans memory cards, DRAM, embedded storage solutions, and enterprise-class SSDs. From the very beginning, …

I absolutely love world firsts. Even more than that, I love seeing genuine technological innovation. Not long ago, we introduced the Longsys Gen4 mSSD, and we were fortunate enough to receive the drive directly from Longsys Chairman Huabo Cai, giving us the opportunity to publish what turned out to be an unexpected world exclusive. That 1TB SSD, no larger than …

When it comes to SSDs, I can’t help but wonder whether the latest price spike is simply a temporary shock driven by AI demand, or whether it was inevitable all along. For a while, we had it incredibly good. High-performance, DRAM-equipped SSDs with generous capacities and five-year warranties were selling at prices that would seem unbelievable today. Those days are …

I’d like to say change is coming to the SSD market, but the reality is that it’s already here. Looking back, it’s a bit amusing because long before the current NAND and DRAM shortages, I wondered whether SSD performance would eventually plateau with PCIe Gen4. What I didn’t anticipate, and neither did anyone else, was the memory shortage that would …

I may get a bit of backlash for saying this, but I continue to be amazed at how a single manufacturer has managed to champion a storage format the way Sony has with the CFexpress Type A card. Many people probably assumed this format would have faded away by now, yet the millions of Sony a1, a7S III, a7R V, …

Random write performance in an enterprise SSD is critical as workloads rely heavily on processing thousands of small, scattered, and simultaneous data requests per second.  These are measured in IOPS. Unlike sequential workloads, random writes do not write data in a contiguous line, making them much harder for the SSD to handle.  SQL, Oracle and virtual machine hosts constantly write …

So this is our third report on a KIOXIA retail SSD and the same thing seems hitting me hard.  This SSD is not available ‘officially’ through KIOXIA retail sales as of yet.  We can find availability of it on Amazon (which is a great thing) but one needs to be careful as this may be from an out of country …

Our review of Seagate’s latest FireCuda Gen4 DRAMless consumer SSD has left us somewhat perplexed, and quite frankly, a little surprised. Until we examined the controller used in this drive, we had long assumed that Seagate and Phison maintained a strategic, long-term partnership across their SSD product lines. This release appears to mark a significant departure from that relationship. Rather …

This report is rather special.  Just under ten years ago, we did a report on an Apricorn Aegis Secure Key 3.0 (ASK3) external SSD which is my longest standing product still in use today.  Ten years.  Most recently, Apricorn reached out asking if I might like to report on their newer updated version of the ASK3 and I couldn’t resist.  …

It has been a while since this release, but we received an SSD in the mail today that deserves a quick look: the XPG Mars 980 Blade by ADATA. This 1TB SSD stands out because we can’t remember the last time we had a drive of this capacity in hand, let alone reviewed one. Times are changing, however, and NAND …