SK hynix is a South Korean company that was founded way back in 1949 as Gukdo Construction and renamed to Hyundai Electronics Industries in 1983 before acquiring LG Semiconductor in 1999.  It changed its name to Hynix Semiconductor in 2001. Most haven’t a clue who they are or what they do.  They are one of few true memory manufacturers in the …

A rather unfortunate and all too common thing we have seen throughout the years is substandard third party components within electronic equipment.  A perfect example might be a storage device in a laptop where, most often, the SSD choice has been poorly thought out by the company.  We have posted a lot of notebook and Ultrabook reviews throughout the years …

Lexar has recently released their Professional Diamond Series CFExpress Type B Memory Card and they believe this card is the ‘worlds fastest’ CFExpress card to date. Specifications list speeds of 1900MB/s read, 1700MB/s write and 1600MB/s sustained write and, if these numbers pan out, this would be an industry leading storage device.  As much as we appreciate these numbers, we …

One of the biggest advances at the forefront of digital technology in the past few years has to do with data storage and the introduction of CFExpress cards.  As an avid photographer and digital enthusiast, myself… I wonder what took so long and… in fact, I wonder why the digital industry has lagged so far behind when we consider the …

I get asked quite often what I prefer with respect to storage cards in my camera equipment.  I try to stay away from exact brands and move the conversation into what I believe are necessary characteristics of the cards that I will put in my digital equipment.  Three things stand out.   I want storage that has high sustained write speeds …

To say that CFExpress Type B cards haven’t redefined digital media in the past two years would be an understatement.  Many enjoy their advantages in moving large photo and video files from the card to PC for work in a fraction of the time that it used to take, but more importantly, its what CFExpress B cards do inside the …

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 …