ADATA XPG Atom 50 Review: A Speedy Gen 4 SSD For Gamers

The NVMe M.2 solid state storage market continues to expand with an ever-increasing number of drives, at a variety of price points and performance targets. There has been a steady influx of high-end drives targeting enthusiasts, along with an array of more-affordable DRAM-less offerings specifically tuned for consumer and gaming workloads. The ADATA XPG Atom 50 we’ll be showing you here today falls into the latter category. The ADATA XPG Atom 50 is available for a relatively low price, yet packs some decent specifications, including a native PCIe Gen 4 interface and sequential transfers north...

WD Black SN770 SSD Review: Killer Gen 4 Storage For Gamers

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Feb 02, 2022

WD just launched a brand new series of PCIe Gen 4 solid state drives that target gamers on a budget, the WD Black SN770. As its names suggests, the new WD Black SN770 sits ahead of the previous-gen SN750 drives in WD’s line-up, but a tick behind the flagship, top-performing SN850. Like the WD Black SN850 though, the SN770 is a PCIe Gen 4 x 4 drive, designed to offer increased bandwidth and lower latency than older PCIe Gen 3 drives, but it’s also a cost-reduced solutions that eschews a DRAM cache and leverages a scaled back controller. We’ll get to the particulars shortly. For...

Kingston KC3000 SSD Review: A PCIe Gen 4 Speed Demon

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, Jan 10, 2022

At a time when it’s exceedingly tough for enthusiasts to acquire many top-flight PC components, dashing hopes for many a fun upgrade or new build, solid state drives remain a shining beacon of hope. The SSD market has seen a consistent influx of new and updated products, addressing virtually every price bracket, with good availability across the board. At the high-end, massive performance increases have also been the order of the day, with PCIe 5 drives – set to double peak sequential performance yet again to nearly 14GB/s – due to arrive later this year. As it stand today, Phison-based...

Intel’s PCIe 5 SSD Sneak Peek Shows Blistering-Fast 28GB/s Speeds With Dual Samsung Drives

by Jeff Butts - Fri, Dec 31, 2021

Update (12/31/01): Intel's Ryan Shrout decided not to wait for CES to showcase a 12th Gen Intel Core i9-12900K system rocking a Samsung PM1743 PCIe 5.0 solid state drive achieving over 13GB/s in IOMeter, but why not showcase a pair of drives? The question was posed, and Shrout answered with another awesome bandwidth demo, this time achieving an eye-popping 28GB/s. A few asked why we didn't show both of the PCIe 5.0 drives running at the same time. Fine @IanCutress here you go. Addressing them independently in IOmeter for a combined bandwidth over 28 GB/s!! https://t.co/107wlJ4wit pic.twitter.com/c8fecGkxli...

ADATA XPG Gammix S70 Blade SSD Review: Super-Fast NVMe Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Dec 21, 2021

This past year was a tough one for PC enthusiasts. It was exceedingly difficult to acquire some of the most sought after components, like the latest and greatest CPUs and GPUs for example, and if you were lucky enough to score one, you often had to pay through the nose for it. Solid state storage, however, continued to advance at a steady clip and despite industry wide shortages, pricing remained relatively stable. Some of the best solid state drives are quite affordable, widely available, and some are even predicting significant price drops in the coming year. The ADATA XPG Gammix S70 Blade we’ll...

Intel SSD D7-P5510 Review: Ultra-Fast PCIe 4 Enterprise Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Fri, Jul 09, 2021

Intel has been making noise in virtually all segments of the storage market as of late. A few weeks back, we took a look at the Optane Memory H20, which combines 3DXpoint media with traditional NAND on hybrid M.2 device to accelerate the storage subsystem in mainstream notebooks and PCs. More recently, we evaluated the blazing-fast, ultra-pricey Optane SSD P5800X for high-performance workstations, and we can't forget about the budget friendly SSD 670p that arrived in early March. Today, we’ll shift our focus to the enterprise space and inspect Intel’s recently-announced PCIe Gen 4 SSD...

Intel Optane SSD P5800X Review: The Fastest SSD Ever

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Jun 30, 2021

When we reviewed the Intel Optane SSD 905P back in 2018, despite a significant price premium over NAND-based SSDs, we gave the drive and Editor’s Choice award due to its exceptional performance where it mattered most for consumers, e.g. access times and random transfers at low queue depths. Intel Optane solid state drives typically offer much better latency characteristics, more consistent and predicable performance with a variety of workloads -- regardless of how much drive capacity is being used – and their endurance ratings are off the charts. The only caveats with the 905P were...

Kingston DC1500M SSD Review: High Endurance NVMe Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, Jun 28, 2021

This morning Kingston announced that its latest DC1500M series of enterprise-class solid state drives have begun shipping. Like many of its predecessors in Kingston’s enterprise SSD line-up, the new DC1500M series leverages a hot-pluggable U.2 (2.5”, 15mm) form factor, that’s compatible with common U.2 backplanes. The drives are tuned for mixed-use case, data-intensive workloads, including cloud computing, web hosting, high-performance computing (HPC), virtual infrastructures, and AI and deep learning applications. There are four drives in the initial Kingston DC1500M SSD line-up,...

TEAMGROUP T-Force Cardea Zero Z440 PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD Review

by Ben Funk - Thu, Jun 24, 2021

The PCI Express 4.0 interface has been around on AMD's Ryzen platform for a long time now, ever since the launch of Zen 2 and the X570 chipset. The new spec has finally gone mainstream on Intel's platforms, as well, with the release of the Rocket Lake-S 11th Gen Core processor family and the accompanying Z590 PCH. That means that neither camp is restricted to the older 3.0 spec which has half the bandwidth of the newer PCIe interface. It's high time we saw PCIe 4 solid state drives go mainstream, and today we have another offering on tap as a result with TEAMGROUP's T-Force Cardea Zero Z440...

WD_Black D50 Game Dock Review: Wicked-Fast External Storage

by Ben Funk - Mon, Jun 14, 2021

Notebooks often have limited storage capacity, despite significant advancements over the last few years. An M.2 drive is only the size of a stick of gum, but not every laptop can fit more than one or two drives at a time, and some users aren't comfortable opening up their machine to upgrade them, which ultimately limits their storage capabilities. This is particularly painful in gaming notebooks, when many games can take up dozens of gigabytes a piece. Western Digital thinks it has a solution, though. The WD Black D50 Game Dock is an all-in-one Thunderbolt 3 dock and PCI Express NVMe storage controller...

Phison E18 With Micron B47R Preview: Future Of PCIe 4 SSDs

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, May 25, 2021

A number of today’s best performing, PCIe Gen 4 solid state drives are built around Phison’s E18 controller. If you remember, way back when the AMD Ryzen 3000 series debuted, a number of SSD providers also launched Phison PS5016-E16 based drives alongside the processors to highlight some of the benefits of the platform's PCI Express Gen 4 bandwidth. Those early drives paired the Phison E16 with some of Toshiba’s BiCS4 NAND flash memory and SK Hynix DRAM to produce some fast SSDs at the time, but the E16 wasn’t actually a native PCIe 4 solution. Soon thereafter, Phison began...

Intel Optane Memory H20 Review: Performance Where It Matters

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, May 17, 2021

Intel first showed off its Optane Memory H20 solid state drive late last year. Just in case you missed the initial news, Optane Memory H20 is the follow-up to 2019’s Optane Memory H10, which combines 3D Xpoint-based Optane Memory technology and QLC (quad-level cell) 3D NAND flash on a single M.2 storage device. The Intel Optane Memory H20 is a hybrid solid state drive that leverages Intel’s latest Optane Memory media and 144-layer QLC NAND flash memory, but is designed to offer the benefits of both. Like the first-gen H10, the new Optane Memory H20 will find its way into utlrabooks,...

Samsung SSD 980 Review: Affordable NVMe PC Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Mar 09, 2021

Although the company just recently fleshed out its flagship line of PCIe Gen 4 NVMe solid state drives with the 2TB SSD 980 Pro, Samsung is already back at it, with yet another family of drives that target a different market segment. While the Samsung SSD 980 Pro is intended for workstations types, performance enthusiasts and gamers that crave nothing but the best, the new Samsung SSD 980 drives – sans “Pro” – we’ll be showing you here today, target more mainstream computing applications. The branding of the new Samsung SSD 980s may be reminiscent of their higher-end...

Intel SSD 670p Review: Snappy, Budget-Friendly NVMe Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, Mar 01, 2021

Intel is releasing a new family of solid state drives today, targeting mainstream users and everyday computing tasks. The new Intel SSD 670p series leverages the company’s latest 144-layer QLC 3D NAND flash memory technology, with an improved dynamic SLC caching algo and updated PCIe Gen 3 controller. Unlike some of the more recent ultra-high-end PCIe Gen 4 SSDs to be released recently, complete with insanely high sequential transfer speeds north of 7GB/s, the Intel SSD 670p eschews the blazing sequentials in favor of optimized performance for random transfers at low queue depths that are...

Samsung SSD 980 Pro 2TB Review: Flagship PCIe 4 NVMe Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Feb 16, 2021

In September of last year, the initial salvo of Samsung SSD 980 Pro drives was launched. At the time, Samsung SSD 980 Pro PCIe 4 NVMe drives in capacities of 250GB on up to 1TB were made available, but a 2TB drive had been announced and was on the roadmap as well. It took a bit of time for Samsung to make the 2TB drive a reality, but nevertheless it is here now, and we’ve got one on hand for some benchmarking and evaluation. Except for its obviously higher capacity, the 2TB Samsung SSD 980 Pro doesn’t differ from the smaller drives that were previously made available. Due to how the...

ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70 And S50 Lite Review: PCIe 4 Speed Or Value

by Marco Chiappetta - Thu, Feb 04, 2021

ADATA has been consistently expanding its line-up of XPG, or Xtreme Performance Gaming branded hardware, targeting PC enthusiasts and gamers. The XPG family now consists of everything from micoSDXC cards all the way on up to full gaming systems and notebooks. XPG's SSDs (Solid State Drives), however, are arguably the most extensive array of products in the company's portfolio. ADATA has a myriad of XPG SSDs available, at a wide variety of price points and performance levels. The two drives we’ll be showing you here today, the new ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70 and XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite, are both...

Samsung SSD 870 EVO Review: The Fastest SATA SSDs Yet

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Jan 19, 2021

Samsung is expanding their line-up of SATA-based solid state drives, with a new series of products designed to balance performance and capacity. A few months back, the company launched the SSD 870 QVO series of drives, based on QLC, or quad-level cell, V-NAND. These new Samsung drives launching today – the Samsung SSD 870 EVO series – are similar in many regards, but EVO SSDs feature Samsung’s latest TLC (triple level cell) V-NAND, with the commensurate firmware to match. These new TLC-based drives also offer slightly higher performance than their QLC-based predecessors, with...

WD Blue SN550 SSD Review: Superb, Budget NVMe Storage

by Ben Funk - Mon, Jan 04, 2021

Spinning hard disks are completely out for just about all but the very cheapest of systems. Solid state drives like the WD Blue SN550 we'll be evaluating in this article are here to stay, and continue to make their way into lower-priced, ever more affordable notebooks and desktops. That's no doubt due to the fact that these drives' asking prices have consistently dropped year over year. In 2020, there hasn't been much good news on the affordable, widely-available PC hardware front, but SSD availability has been one bright spot. There's never been a better time to grab an SSD to speed up any PC...

Samsung T7 Portable SSD Review: Blazing Fast, Portable Storage

by Chris Goetting - Wed, Oct 21, 2020

Earlier this year, Samsung unveiled the privacy-minded Portable SSD T7 Touch. This external USB-C storage device delivered high capacities up to 2TB and impressive read-write speeds over USB 3.2 Gen 2. Its headlining feature, however, was an integrated fingerprint reader to effortlessly unlock the drive’s AES 256-bit encryption. Not everyone needs this one-touch access to their files though, and would prefer a more straightforward external storage solution. For these users Samsung has released a non-touch variant of the T7 to shed some cost, but keep the rest of the goodness intact. Samsung...

Samsung SSD 980 Pro Review: Blazing Fast PCIe 4.0 Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Sep 22, 2020

We first caught a glimpse of the Samsung SSD 980 Pro all the way back at CES in early January. The highly-anticipated drive was tucked away in a display case in Samsung’s massive booth on the show floor, but other than the branding, some early claimed performance data, and the fact that drive had a native PCIe 4.0 interface, details were scant. All that changes today, though. We’ve gotten our hands on a couple of shiny, new Samsung SSD 980 Pro drives – in 250GB and 1TB flavors – and are finally able to give you the full scoop. The Samsung SSD 980 Pro series of solid state...

ADATA Falcon And Swordfish SSD Reviews: Affordable NVMe Storage

by Ben Funk - Thu, Jul 30, 2020

By now, everyone with even the vaguest of interest in PC technology can tell you how much snappier solid state drives are than even the fastest of spinning disks of yesteryear. There have been some interesting wrinkles recently, like ultra-high speed drives that ride the PCI Express 4.0 bus, but in test after test, regardless of drive type, just having a modern SSD offers enough of a boost to make an older PC feel new again. Similarly, it's basically a necessity to slap an SSD like one of the ADATA drives we'll be showing you here, into a new system build to not make any big sacrifices in responsiveness....

Kingston DC1000M SSD Review: Big, Fast NVMe Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Fri, Jul 10, 2020

Kingston recently released its DC1000M series of solid-state drives for data center applications, capped off by a massive 7.68TB model. The DC1000M series leverages a hot-pluggable U.2 (2.5”, 15mm) form factor, that’s compatible with U.2 backplanes and the drives target mixed-use, data-intensive workloads, including Cloud computing, web hosting, high-performance computing (HPC), virtual infrastructures, and AI and deep learning applications. There are four drives in the initial Kingston DC1000M family, bookended by a 960GB model and the aforementioned 7.68TB behemoth. We’ve got...