Tag Archives: SSD

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. …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

It is funny how things work out sometimes.  While at Computex in Taipei a few weeks back, we were introduced to Frank Chen, CEO of Exascend, through our contacts at SMI.  Frank laid out their company values and explained key reasoning for their success which is their ability to customize and cater to their customers needs in a shorter time …

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 …

Phison’s newest E37T DRAMless controller was on display at Computex 2026 this week and appears to be a force to be reckoned with.  This DRAMless SSD comes along at a time when SSDs are at a premium, the result of NAND and DRAM pricing being driven up through AI needs.  I don’t think we have seen pricing this high since …