In the most recent SSD of the Week we went over the top performing Samsung XP941 as our highlight. It offers speeds that are twice that of the SATA 6Gb/s limit in a M.2 form factor. Now, we are going to focus back on the mainstream market. This week we are looking at the SanDisk Ultra II. The market is …

If you could load a motherboard with absolute killer features, what would you include?  Intel’s new X99 chipset opens the door a bit where, with the right X99 CPU, our PCIe lanes increase to 40 allowing us the leverage to stack our systems much more than we ever could have before.  Can you imagine a triple SLI/Crossfire graphics card layout …

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 …

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 …

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, …

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 …

A few days ago, we released our review of the Intel SSD DC P3700 NVMe SSD.  This new entry to the enterprise market brought in just under 500K IOPS in a single PCB and single controller design package, a design not needing the traditional RAID solution to achieve performance above 2.5GB/s.  As much attention as it gained from the enterprise …

Some time ago, Samsung introduced their 3D V-NAND (vertical NAND) to the world and NAND flash memory took on a whole new look with what some might call, very high aspirations.  Samsung was quick to point out that, as demands for reduced memory sizes increased, achieving a smaller footprint meant increased error rates and performance limitations. An example of this …

Capacity, performance and value are three things always being examined by the media professional to increase efficiency and productivity.  Similarly, a large chunk of media production and editing still favors the Mac.  Our report today examines the newest release of the OWC ThunderBolt 4 external storage device, a device that connects to the newest Mac Pro via single or dual …