We happened upon an odd display while touring the Seagate Suite at the Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas, as part of CES 2015 this week.  Displayed below is what appears to be an ADATA SSD that contains the typical MacBook MBA/MBP SSD connector, along with a LSI SandForce controller that is definitely not the newest SF3700. As odd as we …

If we were to look at the flash controller hierarchy, Phison has typically placed as a mid-tier company.  We met with Phison at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California, this past August and they spoke of a new controller that might move them up in the stack, the Phison Quad-Core PS3110 6Gbps controller.  Capable of 550MB/s read, 530MB/s …

If you are going to introduce a new motherboard to the world, perhaps the best marketing feat one could achieve would be to set a new overclocking world record for that board close to the time of its release.  Nick Shih of ASRock did that with the new ASRock X99 OC Formula recently by overclocking the latest Intel i7-5960X chip …

M.2 SSDs are starting to gain traction. The Samsung XP941 is starting to become more available and Plextor won Best of Show with their M6e at FMS this year. Both LiteOn and Hynix displayed some 1TB M.2 SSDs and LSI showed off some M.2 reference designs with their latest SF37000 controller. However, these larger capacity products aren’t going to be …

Our review of the SPYRUS WorkSafe Pro Windows To Go Secure Flash Drive marks the world’s first independent report of the SPYRUS encrypted flash drive, a flash drive that would most definitely suit the likes of James Bond.  It brings to end a period of over two years of discussions and final agreement on exactly what could (or could not …

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, …

At the 2014 Samsung SSD Global Summit, Samsung showcased its latest consumer SSD, the 850 PRO.  Just like the 840 PRO before it, we loved the 850 PRO’s performance and technological advances.  In fact, it is probably the best SATA 3 (6Gbps) drive on the market.  As an enterprise reviewer, I expected the normal 6-12 month wait before the 850 …