Our SSD Reviews

Kingston, like other memory manufacturers, wanted to get into the solid state storage game a few years back. At the time they chose to partner with Intel, offering their own label on the chipmaker’s first gen SSDs like enterprise-oriented X25-E. Eventually, they branched out with new controllers from Toshiba and JMicron, resulting in a bewildering array of options. More recently, Kingston switched to …

It was just over a year ago that we reviewed the Super Talent 50GB RC8 ‘SandForce Driven’ USB 3 Flash Drive and made the call of it being the fastest flash drive on the planet. Our prediction then was that it would be a natural progression that, soon enough, we would be booting complete systems off of just this type …

The Kingston DT Workspace USB 3.0 Flash Drive is a ‘LSI SandForce Driven’ SSD that can start it’s own OS on any computer, compliments of the new Microsoft Windows 8 Enterprise Windows to Go (WTG) environment. As of today, technology has taken us to a place where it simply isn’t necessary to be stuck to a single system, or lug …

Since Day One in the SSD arena, there has been a constant struggle where a seemingly three way tug of war is seen between performance, capacity and value. Enter TLC memory and we just may hit both value and capacity at some point, however, manufacturers still believe the feasibility of marketing a 1TB SSD just isn’t there yet. This a …

Many organizations implement a “rip and replace” model using cheaper consumer-grade SSDs, and when they inevitably meet their demise under intensive workloads, they’re simply removed and replaced with new drives, increasing the cost of storage. Instead of moving up to much pricier solid state storage options, simply burning though cheaper drives makes more financial sense. SMART Storage Systems’s new CloudSpeed …

It’s been roughly two years since the SSD industry transitioned to SATA 3 and many believed that Intel had missed the bus. Early leaks of the ‘Intel Road Map’ showed a mere X25 upgrade creating concern as the industry was graduating to SATA 3 and Intel had no 6Gbps design in place. Intel jumped back to reality with the ‘Marvel’ …

Our SSD review today examines the new PNY XLR8 Pro 6Gbps SSD and one might think that, after reviewing SSDs for six years and having somewhere in the area of 100TB of SSD storage in the office, receiving a 480GB SSD in the mail wouldn’t be exciting. In that, you would be wrong.  As much as getting such an SSD …

Up on TSSDR’s bench we have a pre-release sample of Runcore’s new Rocket Air SATA 3 SSD and it is designed specifically for Mid-2012 Macbooks and similar ultrabooks that might fit the same SSD form factor. The introduction of such an SSD today is like a breath of fresh air for many MBA and ultrabook owners as ‘blade’ or ‘gumstick’ …

The Micron P320h HHHL (Half-Height Half-Length) is a Gen 2.1 PCIe SSD capable of churning out 785K 4K random read IOPS and a little over 200K 4K random write IOPS at steady state. With Microns stash of SLC NAND flash memory, their custom controller, and some great command line and GUI tools, This PCIe SSD is ready to compete. Having …

The race to get the performance and longevity of expensive SLC flash at MLC prices has been going on for some time now. SMART Storage Systems believe that their unique blend of technologies has the potential to replace SLC-based drives in many applications, helping to tip the scales of price vs. performance in favor of high-endurance MLC products. SMART’s Optimus SAS …