Tag Archives: Crystal DiskMark

I’d like to say change is coming to the SSD market, but the reality is that it’s already here. Looking back, it’s a bit amusing because long before the current NAND and DRAM shortages, I wondered whether SSD performance would eventually plateau with PCIe Gen4. What I didn’t anticipate, and neither did anyone else, was the memory shortage that would …

I may get a bit of backlash for saying this, but I continue to be amazed at how a single manufacturer has managed to champion a storage format the way Sony has with the CFexpress Type A card. Many people probably assumed this format would have faded away by now, yet the millions of Sony a1, a7S III, a7R V, …

So this is our third report on a KIOXIA retail SSD and the same thing seems hitting me hard.  This SSD is not available ‘officially’ through KIOXIA retail sales as of yet.  We can find availability of it on Amazon (which is a great thing) but one needs to be careful as this may be from an out of country …

Our review of Seagate’s latest FireCuda Gen4 DRAMless consumer SSD has left us somewhat perplexed, and quite frankly, a little surprised. Until we examined the controller used in this drive, we had long assumed that Seagate and Phison maintained a strategic, long-term partnership across their SSD product lines. This release appears to mark a significant departure from that relationship. Rather …

This report is rather special.  Just under ten years ago, we did a report on an Apricorn Aegis Secure Key 3.0 (ASK3) external SSD which is my longest standing product still in use today.  Ten years.  Most recently, Apricorn reached out asking if I might like to report on their newer updated version of the ASK3 and I couldn’t resist.  …

It’s rare that we open a report with such high praise for a product right from the first sentence. It’s even rarer when that product happens to be an external SSD. In fact, I’ve only done it once before back in 2018 for the Tekq Rapide. That same TB3 external SSD is still sitting right in front of me today. …

It has been a while since this release, but we received an SSD in the mail today that deserves a quick look: the XPG Mars 980 Blade by ADATA. This 1TB SSD stands out because we can’t remember the last time we had a drive of this capacity in hand, let alone reviewed one. Times are changing, however, and NAND …

It is not often that we start a report off speaking to the interior components of an SSD.  This is that exception so bear with us as this will play out very well.  Last June, we attended Computex and discovered a new PCIe 5.0 SSD controller by SMI, the SM2504XT.  Its extremely small footprint tied into great performance, while having …

With the price of SSDs these days, people are looking elsewhere for storage solutions.  Many are also realizing that they have upgraded SSDs at some point… and they may have an SSD lying around that could now be of use.  This is no different with the consumer or the media professional, except for the fact that the media professional is …

QLC NAND flash memory has been available in an SSD for sometime now, and as with TLC before it and MLC before that, it has experienced some growing pains.  With every generation of memory comes the naysayers and haters that prefer to look back rather than forward.  Luckily companies such as Micron look forward.  The unfortunate reality, however, is that …