Tag Archives: PCIe 5.0

While attending Computex in Taiwan this past June, The SSD Review had the opportunity to meet with Exascend CEO and Founder Frank Chen, who provided valuable insight into the company’s background and philosophy. Exascend is a NAND flash storage specialty manufacturer with a product portfolio that spans memory cards, DRAM, embedded storage solutions, and enterprise-class SSDs. From the very beginning, …

I absolutely love world firsts. Even more than that, I love seeing genuine technological innovation. Not long ago, we introduced the Longsys Gen4 mSSD, and we were fortunate enough to receive the drive directly from Longsys Chairman Huabo Cai, giving us the opportunity to publish what turned out to be an unexpected world exclusive. That 1TB SSD, no larger than …

Random write performance in an enterprise SSD is critical as workloads rely heavily on processing thousands of small, scattered, and simultaneous data requests per second.  These are measured in IOPS. Unlike sequential workloads, random writes do not write data in a contiguous line, making them much harder for the SSD to handle.  SQL, Oracle and virtual machine hosts constantly write …

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 …

I just can’t wrap my head around why KIOXIA hasn’t brought its consumer SSDs to North America. And, in the same vein, I still don’t fully understand why Micron retired the much-loved Crucial brand. That said, I’m convinced KIOXIA-branded SSDs would do extremely well here, potentially rivaling those top-tier bestsellers we all know. In the meantime, our small team is …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …