Listing any product as the worlds best is just asking for trouble.  I did just that a few years back when I made the switch from PC to the Apple MacBook Air. The MBA achieved those accolades thanks to Samsung who supplied Apple with their PCIe SSD, even before equipping their own ultrabooks.  The industry has since forgotten to educate …

For what seemed like an eternity Samsung has been the leader in manufacturing 3D NAND. Starting with the release of the Samsung 850 Pro two years ago, they have paved the way for innovation. 3D NAND brings greater capacity, power efficiency, and lower cost to the consumers. After first announcing their 32-Layer 3D NAND last year in March, we have been …

Targeted towards read-intensive workloads, boot, and logging applications in both servers and mobile computing, the X400 is SanDisk’s top-tier client SATA SSD available in both M.2 and 2.5″ form factors. Based on the marketing material it seems that SanDisk has put a lot of value into this drive, not only with its feature set, but performance and efficiency. The X400 is the …

High capacity and high-performance SSDs are starting to pop up every which way in the enterprise segment and competition is getting heated. Thanks to PMC with their latest Flashtec NVMe controllers, third party SSD vendors are able to develop these high capacity, high performance devices faster than ever with features catered to their target buyers. Techman SSD, a new company, is one …

More MB/s, more IOPS, and lower latencies are what storage enthusiasts dream of. CPUs, RAM, and GPUs are all pushing faster speeds than ever, but storage has typically been a bottleneck for enthusiasts, even after the introduction of SSDs. To enable faster speeds bus bandwidth has been increased over the years and storage has started to migrate onto the PCIe bus so that …

The Toshiba XG3 SSD is a M.2 NVMe drive which just may be the most powerful SSD on the market….well not really on the market. It isn’t available through consumer sales and can only be found pre-installed in ultrabooks, unless of course you are lucky enough to dig one up on eBay.  The downfall of trying to get ones hands …

As the SSD industry continues to grow, manufacturers try to maintain their consumer presence with more value-oriented consumer products.  Such is the case with Intel’s latest step into the TLC segment by introducing their newest 540s SATA 3 SSD a few weeks back. The Intel 540s Series is their first SSD to feature 16nm TLC NAND and first 5 series …

We’ve been able to test our fair share of SSDs over the years and, to this date, there remains a constant.  Prices drop.  Where we once saw a 32GB SSD peak at $5000 in 2007, today’s world is vastly different and 1TB SSDs are now available at just over the $300 mark.   Value is key in technology and has always …

The ability to upgrade storage in today’s smartphones seems to have become key once again. It is the dividing point between Samsung and Apple.  A Samsung S7 smart phone allows the user to add up to 200GB of storage space whereas the Apple iPhone 6S tops out at 128GB, that storage increasing the iPhone price by several hundred dollars. This …

A great indication of how far we have come in flash technology lies in flash drives themselves, where we see today’s flash drives capable of transfer speeds of yesterday’s solid state drives.   While the difference between the two is still vast, the advance of USB versions has seen us move from 35MB/s with USB 2.0 to over 20x that with …