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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.  …

I just can’t wrap my head around why KIOXIA hasn’t brought its consumer SSDs to North America. And, in the same vein, I still don’t fully understand why Micron retired the much-loved Crucial brand. That said, I’m convinced KIOXIA-branded SSDs would do extremely well here, potentially rivaling those top-tier bestsellers we all know. In the meantime, our small team is …

This week at Computex Taipei, Silicon Motion displayed their newest SM2524XT Gen5 SSD controller which held a surprising first.  This SSD controller is built on the TSMC 6nm process and is a DRAMless controller which relies on your systems HMB, better known as the host memory buffer.  The HMB is an SSD feature that allows a drive without its own …

Phison’s newest E37T DRAMless controller was on display at Computex 2026 this week and appears to be a force to be reckoned with.  This DRAMless SSD comes along at a time when SSDs are at a premium, the result of NAND and DRAM pricing being driven up through AI needs.  I don’t think we have seen pricing this high since …

Many might not know the term ‘Olympico’ but it speaks to a corner kick which scores a goal without any other player touching the ball in football. It is incredibly rare.  It is considered the impossible goal. As coincidence may have it, it’s name comes from Argentine player Cesareo Onzari who scored the first one against the Olympic champions, Uruguay, …

It is not often that we report on something non-storage but we just happened to come across a display showing the Intel Wildcat Lake Core 7 360 platform at the Phison booth today.  Could this have been an Intel slip?  We certainly aren’t aware of many similar sightings of such in the wild. This just happens to coincide with Phison’s …

If you are a fan of The SSD review, you may remember a post we made and subsequent review of a very innovative storage design by Longsys at CES this past January.  It was called the mSSD and was a concept back then, a concept by which we were fortunate to provide full report on right here!  That product was …

Less than a week from now The SSD  Review/Technology X is off to Computex Taipei!  This has been a staple in our business attendance for some 14 years now and we are looking forward to the trip, this year sponsored by our friends at Silicon Motion once again.  It will be great to touch base with old friends and new, …

It’s rare that we open a report with such high praise for a product right from the first sentence. It’s even rarer when that product happens to be an external SSD. In fact, I’ve only done it once before back in 2018 for the Tekq Rapide. That same TB3 external SSD is still sitting right in front of me today. …

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 …

Our look at the KIOXIA CD9P-R Gen5 Data Center SSD marks a first for The SSD Review, and it’s a bit of a nostalgic one. Our connection with the KIOXIA team stretches back many years, all the way to the early OCZ Revo and Vertex days. That lineage later became Toshiba, and eventually KIOXIA around 2018–2019. Since shifting our focus …

With the price of memory these days, it can only be expected that we will see more value-driven options in both client and consumer SSD solutions, such as pre-configured PCs and laptops. Right in line with this, KIOXIA has introduced its first Gen4 QLC NAND equipped SSD known as the EG7. The KIOXIA EG7 Series is a PCIe 4.0 (Gen4) …

It is not often that we start a report off speaking to the interior components of an SSD.  This is that exception so bear with us as this will play out very well.  Last June, we attended Computex and discovered a new PCIe 5.0 SSD controller by SMI, the SM2504XT.  Its extremely small footprint tied into great performance, while having …

With the price of SSDs these days, people are looking elsewhere for storage solutions.  Many are also realizing that they have upgraded SSDs at some point… and they may have an SSD lying around that could now be of use.  This is no different with the consumer or the media professional, except for the fact that the media professional is …

I’ve always felt there’s a gap in the flash storage industry. We do a great job serving consumer and client segments, and then suddenly jump straight to server and data center solutions. Media professionals are often lumped in with enthusiast-level consumer storage and it feels like there is a segment missing in flash storage.  When was the last time you …