Tag Archives: evaluation

Up bright and early this morning to put the finishing touches on what has been a whirlwind of SSD reviews over the past few weeks. In less than 48 hours, I’ll be setting the keyboard aside for a month as I embark on a coast-to-coast-to-coast motorcycle journey across North America in under three weeks, Atlantic to Pacific and back again. …

When it comes to SSDs, I can’t help but wonder whether the latest price spike is simply a temporary shock driven by AI demand, or whether it was inevitable all along. For a while, we had it incredibly good. High-performance, DRAM-equipped SSDs with generous capacities and five-year warranties were selling at prices that would seem unbelievable today. Those days are …

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, …

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.  …

Our look at the KIOXIA CD9P-R Gen5 Data Center SSD marks a first for The SSD Review, and it’s a bit of a nostalgic one. Our connection with the KIOXIA team stretches back many years, all the way to the early OCZ Revo and Vertex days. That lineage later became Toshiba, and eventually KIOXIA around 2018–2019. Since shifting our focus …

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 …

I’ve always felt there’s a gap in the flash storage industry. We do a great job serving consumer and client segments, and then suddenly jump straight to server and data center solutions. Media professionals are often lumped in with enthusiast-level consumer storage and it feels like there is a segment missing in flash storage.  When was the last time you …

There is a new SSD that is about to make its mark and it changes things.  It is the mSSD, short for microSSD, and Longsys holds the patented IP (intellectual property) with Lexar already pushing forward with their Play X Gen4 SSD and AI Storage Core releases.  It has been discussed at some length by other companies, however we have …