Last week we kicked it up a notch for the SSD of the Week with the enterprise Intel NVMe PCIe DC P3700. However, this week we are on the opposite spectrum with the budget SSDs. The highlight of this week is the Crucial MX100. In previous years Crucial has tried to cut costs by using a cheaper SATA controller, but …

Summer has come and gone, and over the past few months, there have been quite a few SSDs released into the market, and the question of, “Which SSD should I buy?” seems to still come up a lot around forums. Usually, there are some predetermined recommended favorite in each. Today we feel we should provide our own answer to the …

SSDs have been around for several years now, but some could argue that they have yet to hit mainstream.  When you compare SSD sales today to the hard drive, we could make a case when we state that they are still in their infancy.  The biggest reasoning for this, of course, has been industries lack of ability to find that …

With CPUs, graphics cards and memory, solid state drive were only a matter of time for a company such as AMD.  The AMD Radeon R7 SSD adds yet another AMD part to those who like to have matching components in their systems, but it also goes one step further. It takes advantage of a controller that has long been regarded …

Being niche in a dog eat dog tech market can be very risky. Being niche in the SSD industry is straight up crazy as NAND manufacturers price their SSDs so low that 3rd party SSD manufacturers find it very hard to compete; or they shut down.  More than a few companies have slowed, or shut down their SSD production and, …

Silicon Motion (SMI)  has met with success as of late with release of their  SM2246EN SATA 3 SSD controller.  It was just under a year ago that we sat with Robert Fan to discuss the future of SM2246EN, while today it can be found in the PNY Optima, Corsair LX, as well as the ADATA SP610 of this report. Our …

A few days ago, we released our review of the Intel SSD DC P3700 NVMe SSD.  This new entry to the enterprise market brought in just under 500K IOPS in a single PCB and single controller design package, a design not needing the traditional RAID solution to achieve performance above 2.5GB/s.  As much attention as it gained from the enterprise …

Intel is announcing the addition of three PCIe solid-state drive (SSD) solutions to its well-established data center family of storage products.  Intel’s SSD Data Center Family will now be offering both SATA and PCIe solutions in multiple endurance levels and multiple capacities, all featuring enterprise-class RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability)  features. The ongoing explosion of data storage requirements for data center …

The current PCIe add-in-card storage market is separated into two general architectures.  The first is ground-up, native PCIe designs, such as the Micron P320h.  These devices eschew a typical SATA/SAS controller in favor of specialized flash controllers that have native PCIe interfaces.  This is where the market is heading.  In fact, later this year, you should start to see many …

Integrated Device Technology (IDT) did well this week at Flash Memory Summit, demonstrating their 16 channel NVMe 1.0 standard PCIe SSD controller. The first publicly seen device of it’s type, the IDT controller is on the leading edge of the new NVMe standard. IDT is interested in selling their controllers to third parties rather than selling their own SSDs, but to …