Tag Archives: Storage 2.0

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 …

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 …

It is always refreshing when we get something on our bench that is new…maybe even a bit out of the ordinary.  On our Test Bench today is the SK hynix Platinum P51 Gen5 2TB SSD and this SSD is as proprietary as they come.  The controller, DRAM buffer chip and NAND memory are all SK hynix manufactured and this SSD …

Sure signs of a storage geek… I haven’t been on the ground no more than 36 hours after returning on a 15hr hr flight from Computex Taipei and I am testing storage.  Worse yet… my initial testing for today’s report was only completed at 4:30am this morning… Yup extreme jet lag…  But look at this.  These two SSDs in this …

There has always been a rather distinct division in the SSD world.  As much as there had to be a value driven SSD to move the typical SSD users over, there also became that demand for the top performing SSDs, and so there should be.  Flash media performance has changed our world exponentially.  Whether we realize it or not, every …

And so the steam train of SSD speeds keeps moving.  It wasn’t so long ago that we thought things were doing so well when we saw SATA speeds of 540MB/s jump to over 1GB/s…and then 2GB/s to 3.5GB/s which doubled again and is now doubling once more.  To those on the outside, it seems like such a simple jump but …

I remember a few years back when I got my hands on the first SATA SSD and first experienced the difference between a hard drive and SSD.  Back then, part of my job was creating legal disclosures and completing a vetted and optimized 300 page report in Acrobat might take 30 to 45 minutes.  With an SSD it took 30 …

If we look back at the last few months of SSD progression, it becomes rather evident that there is just a bit of a fist fight between competing SSD controller manufacturers, SMI and Phison.  SMI has maintained a solid footprint in the industry for the last few years but most recently, Phison released its 5012-E12 controller which has gained quite …