Tag Archives: Crystal DiskMark

It has been almost a year since Crucial/Micron introduced their new M500 family and, with that, came the news of what we then termed as a new Crucial M500 NGFF SSD that would be introduced to retail consumers.  Today, many are now searching for high-capacity M.2 SSDs both for their purchase and upgrade of new M.2 SSD contained systems, and …

Marketing of PCI Express SSDs has always been somewhat tricky as the fine balance between performance and value wasn’t much of a balance at all; performance being the obvious strongpoint of these cards.  The difficulty in manufacturing a consumer directed PCIe SSD, that can promise value, has most likely been the reason all haven’t jumped aboard the ‘PCI Express’. VisionTek …

The advent of M.2 SSDs holds the promise of eliminating the SATA bottleneck and, while it may not seem that big of a deal for the typical consumer, improved performance to a media professional is pure gold.  Faster transfer speeds translate into quicker job completion which realizes increased business and higher revenue.  Although we have had M.2 SSDs in hand …

A few weeks ago we received an e-mail asking our opinion on the VisionTek mSATA SSD as the writer had found an amazing deal on that SSD, yet there wasn’t a review in site.  Admittedly, even I wasn’t all that familiar with VisionTek and didn’t even know they were marketing SSDs. In conducting a quick search, I had to laugh …

Perhaps one of the best mindsets I have seen in my six years in the SSD industry is the ambition to not only improve SSD technology, but to also take them to the next level.  Selling a consumer SSD as an enterprise one will always be a shot in the dark, but the appetite of SSD manufacturers to push their …

The importance of Toshiba in the flash industry cannot be overstated.  Toshiba is not only one of the world’s largest flash suppliers, but also, they are often recognized as the prime choice when SSD manufacturers are making quality SSDs.  Some SSD manufacturers refuse to use anything nut Toshiba NAND flash memory in their SSDs. So where has Toshiba been as …

M.2 PCIe SSDs Reviews Sometimes we get fortunate enough to have just the right hardware at just the right time. Such was the case when Sony sent us their new VAIO Pro 13 Ultrabook with a Samsung XP941 M.2 PCIe SSD for review.  That SSD provided performance speeds over 1GB/s and enabled our statement of the VAIO Pro 13 as …

UNDERSTANDING SATA M.2 AND NATIVE M.2 PCIE SSDS By now, many are aware that there is a new SSD standard known as NGFF or M.2.  NGFF is actually a slang term that started the process rolling and means ‘next generation form factor’.  If you have been following our reviews as of late, you would have also learned that, within the …

Perhaps the two most notable recent trends in SSDs have been the inevitable introduction of M.2 SSDs and the unexpected announcements of ‘driverless’ PCIe SSDs, that require no more than inserting the device into an available PCIe slot and rebooting the PC system. Very close and long-standing industry relations placed us in a position to provide exclusive analysis and report …

When it comes to SSD controllers, up until recent times LSI/SandForce and Marvell have pretty much “ruled the roost”.    Other than a few instances of utilizing proprietary controllers (such as Samsung does in most of their SSDs), and a smaller player in Indilinx (acquired by OCZ),  there were no other options for manufacturers to engineer a new SSD with.  That has …