Without a doubt, the toughest lesson learned on release of the Canon EOS R5 Mirrorless camera was that of storage and this relatively new thing called sustained write performance.  Countless people purchased these cameras, along with first generation CFExpress Type B cards that had not been approved by Canon.  They quickly learned that features that should be available within their …

There is a long standing belief that buying a DRAM-less SSD is just wrong.  As much as this might hold water prior to and for those users not using Windows 10, it doesn’t for those looking for value and performance in storage today.  Without getting too complicated, NVMe and Windows 10 allow the SSD to create a Host Memory Buffer …

Gen 4 SSDs have become common place as of late and manufacturers have elected to rely on the Phison E18 PCIe 4.0 NVMe controller, and for good reason.  It is a top tier controller with performance that provides 7GB/s throughput and over 1 million IOPS and, most recently, we even identified an SSD with this controller as being a ‘game …

An unexpected surprise arrived at our offices this Christmas break in the guise of a PCIe 4.0 DRAM-less SSD.  It was only a matter of time but there has been some clever thought put into this drive.  It is the ADATA XPG Atom 50 Gen 4 SSD and two things that stand out are that it is a single-sided SSD, …

One of the oldest names in SSDs is Kingston.  One might not expect such as Kingston, by all sense of the term, is a third party manufacturer…or distributor.  Unlike Samsung, WD/SanDisk, Intel, Kioxia, Micron, SKHynix and a few others, they do not actually own a fab that ‘grows’ the silicon ingots to manufacture NAND wafers.  Unbelievably, the original Kingston SSDNow …

The Innogrit Ranier Gen4 NVMe SSD controller has met with much success since the company officially came out of stealth mode.   The success of this controller is testament to the experience within the company.  Their management team is led by their CEO Dr. Zining Wu who served as Chief Technology Officer before leaving Marvell, most of his Management Team following …

The popularity of CFExpress Type B cards has been overwhelming over the past year and we are certain that it will continue to grow as newer digital equipment is released with this type of storage in mind.  It moves us from under 100MB/s data transfer speed for most up to over 5x that with CFExpress highs of 1700MB/s.  Don’t get …

So I was in a conversation this week where many were speaking of the success of the Phison E18 controller and I stepped away from the crowd for a bit and had to ask, “Yes but will this last?”  Historically, we have watched different SSD companies, and more specifically, third party SSD controller companies step into the limelight with a …

Perhaps one of the odd ducks in the SSD space has always been Plextor.  Their SSDs have always been amongst the best, but for some reason, they never gained the recognition they deserved.  That’s not just my thought I am sure as reviewers historically have had nothing but good to say about Plextor SSDs.  They are one of the very …

It was only a matter of time until SSDs really got hooked into the gaming scene and today, there isn’t a gamer around without flash media overseeing the storage of their gaming system.  Seagate released their FireCuda 520 back in  December of 2019 with the ‘FireCuda Gaming’ label and today we are reporting on their latest release, the FireCuda 530 …