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 …

It’s not every day that we see an SSD that makes us stop and think.  After our trip to Computex, we were able to take delivery of something that is fairly unique in terms of enterprise storage.  The ALLONE Cloud Disk Drive 101 RAMDisk is not your normal SSD, in fact, it really isn’t an SSD at all. Technically speaking, …

In our home, we have 6 PC’s, 4 laptops, an iMac and a MBA.  Perhaps the most frustrating thing over time is the constant requests for so-and so to provide so-and-so something from their PC.  Installing a separate drive, via network attached storage, has always been an option, but let’s face it; it just isn’t that easy.  Imagine if we …

Our visit with Marvell this week at Computex went as expected and we got a bit of an update on their Altaplus M.2 PCIe X4 controller, previously designated as the Altaplus and numbered 88SS9293.  Timing right now for Marvell is great as Q4 is going to be a key point in time for M.2 X4 release.  LSI expects that the …

Our meeting with JMicron this morning at Computex in Taipei, Taiwan, met with the introduction of two new M.2 PCIe SSD controllers to the SSD arena, the JMicron JMF810 and JMF811.  The 810 is a PCIe X2 (two lane) controller, while the 811 (PCIe X4) will stand beside that of LSI SandForce (SF3700) and Marvell (Altaplus) in Q4 of this …

As funny as it may seem, a close friend in the industry was speaking to me regarding the LSI SF3700 controller at a function yesterday where he identified the possibility that LSI SandForce just may miss an entire generation of controllers should their SF3000 be delayed any longer.  Nobody knows that frustration more than the manufacturers who are at Computex …

Seagate Technology, a world-leading provider of storage products, is announcing that they have entered into a definitive asset purchase agreement with Avago Technologies Limited, which will result in Seagate acquiring from Avago the assets of LSI’s Accelerated Solutions Division (ASD) and Flash Components Division (FCD) for a reported $450 million in cash.  Although a bit of a late-comer to the …

Intel Z97 based motherboards will be making their appearance very shortly and, once again, ASRock seems to flexing their muscle. If you remember their release of the Z87 series, they literally blew away competitors by releasing the Fatal1ty Killer AMD board with the worlds first native PCIe x2 M.2 socket, accomplishing the task of breaking that infamous SATA performance barrier …

OCZ was the first to introduce a PCIe SSD solution to the consumer with their original RevoDrive PCIe SSD way back in 2010, this updated by the RevoDrive X2 PCIe SSD the following June and the RevoDrive 3×2 a few months later. There was no question that OCZ had struck gold with the RevoDrive 3×2 PCIe SSD as it was …

Today, Micron has announced a new member of its enterprise SSD family, the M500DC.  Typically, Micron likes to focus on performance and reliability with their enterprise drives, with cost being a secondary factor. With the M500DC, they have made price a priority. INTRODUCTION About this time last year, we were reviewing the Crucial M500 960GB.  This was the first drive …