Intel SSD DC P3608 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive Review

Major players in the solid state storage business continue to innovate at a breakneck pace, especially now that the market has begun a shift away from the lowly SATA interface towards higher performing alternatives like PCI Express. For a while, manufacturers were bolting multiple SATA controllers together on single devices, in RAID configurations, to boost performance beyond what a single SATA-based drive could do. But with the advent of NVMe, that’s no longer necessary for most applications. Though, pairing up multiple NVMe devices can also be a means to increase performance, of course.Just to...

Intel SSD 750 Series PCIe SSD Review: NVMe For Desktop Performance

by Dave Altavilla - Tue, Sep 22, 2015

Today, Intel is taking the wraps off new NVMe PCI Express Solid State Drives, which are the first products with these high speed interfaces that the company has launched specifically for the enthusiast computing and workstation crowds. Historically, Intel's PCI Express-based offerings, like the SSD DC P3700 Series, have been squarely targeted for datacenter or enterprise applications, with price tags to match. However, today Intel is throwing performance enthusiasts another bone with the launch of the Intel SSD 750 series. We've historically been big on PCI Express SSDs here, because they get around...

Crucial MX200 1TB and 500GB SSD Reviews: Affordable And Fast

by Paul Lilly - Tue, Aug 25, 2015

Prices for solid state drives have fallen precipitously over the past year. This is especially true when shopping 2.5-inch form factor SATA SSDs, which is where some of the best values in solid state storage are currently found. That's certainly true of Micron's Crucial brand MX200 line, two of which we have in for review here. First announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas earlier this year, the MX200 series debuted in three capacities -- 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB, each priced at under 50 cents per gigabyte. Crucial set the MSRPs at $140 for the 250GB model, $250 for the 500GB...

Western Digital Expands WD Red Pro And WD Black Hard Drives To Bodacious 5TB and 6TB Capacities

by Jason Evangelho - Tue, Aug 18, 2015

If you’re still rocking a 1TB or even 2TB hard drive on your PC, you’re probably starting to feel squeezed by that capacity ceiling sneaking closer and closer. Game download sizes are swelling with the addition of ever-increasing detail and 4K textures (Star Citizen is rumored to exceed 100GB) and content producers can never have enough space to store and edit their digital creations. If you’re looking for a seriously roomy new hard drive or three, Western Digital has you covered with today’s launch of the WD Black 6TB HDD and the NAS-friendly WD Red Pro 6TB. They're also launching 5TB versions...

Intel And Micron Jointly Unveil Disruptive, Game-Changing 3D XPoint Memory, 1000x Faster Than NAND

by Jason Evangelho - Tue, Jul 28, 2015

"This is something many people thought was impossible," exclaimed Intel Senior Vice President Rob Crooke. During an invite-only press conference, Crooke along with Micron CEO Mark Durcan revealed a radically new class of storage and memory architecture called 3D XPoint (pronounced "Cross Point"). To say this is a game-changer would be the understatement of the year. Tangible products based on the technology will debut in 2016, but today's event was focused on the development partnership between Intel and Micron. Frankly, what they've accomplished is astounding. Even though we’re finally on the...

OCZ Trion 100 Series SSD Review: Driving Cost Out Of Solid State Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Thu, Jul 09, 2015

OCZ is launching a brand new series of solid state drives today, dubbed the Trion 100. Early prototypes of the drives were shown off at CES a few months back, but the drives are now ready for primetime. We should note that the Trion 100 series breaks some new ground for OCZ. Not only are they the first drives from the company to use TLC NAND, but they’re also the first to use all in-house Toshiba technology with the drive's Flash memory and controller both designed and built by Toshiba.The OCZ Trion 100 series is targeted at budget conscious consumers and users still contemplating the upgrade from...

Synology DiskStation BeyondCloud Mirror 3TB NAS Review

by Josh Norem - Fri, Jun 26, 2015

Anyone who follows the NAS game will likely recognize the name Synology, but we’d wager most home users aren't quite as familiar with them. That’s simply because Synology storage devices have typically targeted a more advanced crowd, such as readers of this website. If you had ever met someone who was running a Synology NAS at home, you knew right away they were an enthusiast, advanced user, neckbeard, etc. Newbies use more mainstream products, but hardcore guys and gals use Synology--or something like that. Well, times are changing, and Synology is trying to get in on the “cloud storage” game...

WD My Cloud EX2100 Dual Bay 8TB NAS Review

by Josh Norem - Fri, May 08, 2015

The WD My Cloud EX2100 is a new prosumer-oriented NAS drive from WD that continues the company's adventures in the realm of "personal cloud" storage. These drives are aimed directly at people who use Cloud storage such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.com, and others. The marketing speak from WD is that those services require a monthly payment for a small amount of storage, and you have to store your data on someone else's cloud. For example Dropbox charges $10 a month for 1TB of storage, and Google charges the same. WD's pitch is you can get multiple terabytes of storage with one of its drives, and...

Kingston HyperX Predator M.2 PCIe SSD Review

by Marco Chiappetta - Fri, Apr 17, 2015

Solid State Drives continue to be one of the more sought after (and effective) upgrades for both desktop and mobile systems. But as drives have matured, and newer generations have been released, the bandwidth limitations of the legacy SATA interface have become increasingly more apparent. Even relatively affordable, mainstream solid state drives are bumping into the SATA bandwidth limit right alongside more expensive flagship drives, which makes it difficult to differentiate between them based on performance alone.The answer to eliminating the bandwidth limitations of the SATA interface is PCI...

Samsung SSD 850 EVO mSATA and M.2 Drives Reviewed

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Mar 31, 2015

Samsung is introducing a number of new members to their SSD 850 EVO line-up of Solid State Drives, based on different form factors than the standard 2.5” drives we showed you here. The brand new mSATA and M.2 Samsung SSD 850 EVO drives being announced today, however, leverage all of the same technology. The last few generations of Samsung’s 2.5” Solid State Drive utilized PCBs that barley filled up half of their encloses, and a large portion of those PCBs were dedicated to the standard SATA power and data cable connectors, so it’s no shock to see these new, smaller variants arrive with mSATA and...

OCZ Vector 180 Solid State Drive Review: Barefoot 3 Optimized

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Mar 24, 2015

OCZ Technology is at the ready with yet another new Solid State Drive, built around the company’s tried-and-true Barefoot 3 controller. The Vector 180 series drive we’ll be showing you here today is packing some of Toshiba’s latest A19nm MLC NAND flash memory and has some welcomed features and additions normally reserved for more expensive, enterprise-class drives.And the Vector 180 isn’t the only thing OCZ has in store today. Launching alongside this new SSD is a brand new utility, dubbed OCZ Guru, geared for easy management and tuning of OCZ’s enthusiast-class drives. The OCZ Guru utility will...

Samsung Portable SSD T1 Review: Blazing Fast External Storage

by Paul Lilly - Wed, Feb 18, 2015

When they first came out, solid state drives were cost prohibitive for many people and they remained that way until NAND flash memory prices came crashing down like the careers of every actor on "The Celebrity Apprentice." Now not only are SSDs affordable, they're comparatively capacious and much faster than many of the older models, and as a result they've barged into the mainstream market -- that laptop your Aunt Ethel bought from Best Buy could be rocking an SSD. Save for when massive amounts of cheap storage space is needed, SSDs have effectively (and finally) begun to replace HDDs, which is...

WD My Passport Wireless Review: Shared Wireless Storage

by Josh Norem - Fri, Feb 13, 2015

The Western Digital Passport Wireless is a member of a new class of storage devices that combine run-of-the-mill USB storage with wireless hotspot and media center functionality. These devices essentially marry what used to be two separate drives - an external USB device and a media device that can stream data wirelessly to connected devices. They also help address the relatively small amount of storage that is included with today's mobile devices, as they let you store and access terabytes of data on your smartphone or tablet without having to store it locally. It's an interesting combination,...

Plextor M6e Black Edition PCI Express SSD Review, M.2 In The Slot

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, Feb 09, 2015

Last year, Plextor introduced its M6e family of solid state drives. The drives are / were offered in M.2 and PCI Express flavors, though technically the PCIe-based models were the same M.2 drives parked in a PCIe-to-M.2 adapter card. Regardless of the technicalities involved, the Plextor M6e’s specifications and performance were relatively strong, with peak read speeds topping the 770MB/s mark.The original Plextor M6e, however, wasn’t much to look at. It featured a basic, green PCB and the M.2 SSD sat right in the middle for all to see. Plextor decided to kick things up a few notches with a new...

6 TB Hard Drive Round-Up: WD Red, WD Green, Seagate Enterprise

by Josh Norem - Mon, Dec 29, 2014

The hard drive market has become a lot less sexy in the past few years thanks to SSDs. What we used to consider "fast" for a hard drive is relatively slow compared to even the cheapest of today's solid state drives. But there are two areas where hard drives still rule the roost, and that's in terms of overall capacity and cost per gigabyte. Right now you can buy a 4TB hard drive for the same cost as a 256GB SSD, so the two are in separate universes in that regard. We love SSDs and think just about everyone should run their OS on one, but most aren't large enough to hold all user data over a long...

Samsung SSD 850 EVO SATA Solid State Drive Review

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, Dec 08, 2014

Samsung is at the ready with a brand new family of mainstream solid state drives, targeting the market segment previously occupied by its popular SSD 840 EVO series. The new Samsung SSD 850 EVO series is the follow-up to the company’s current flagship SSD 850 PRO, but the new EVO is Samsung’s first to pack 32‐layer 3D V‐NAND 3-bit MLC flash memory. The move to 32‐layer 3D V‐NAND 3-bit MLC flash (a.k.a. TLC) brings costs down, but doesn’t adversely affect endurance because the cell structure doesn’t suffer from the same inherent limitations of planar NAND, since the cells are stacked vertically...

SanDisk Extreme Pro Solid State Drives Reviewed

by Marco Chiappetta - Thu, Nov 20, 2014

When we took at look at SanDisk's Extreme II series of solid state drives in June of last year, we began our article by noting, "odds are, if you’ve bought anything that uses flash memory in the last 20 years or so, you already own a small piece of SanDisk technology. The company has been a leader in flash memory storage since the late ‘80s and manufactures products used in everything from smartphones and portable media players to digital cameras and camcorders. With such a long history in the flash memory business, it’s should be no surprise that SanDisk offers an array of solid...

Anti-Competitive Apple Disables Trim Support On 3rd Party SSDs In OS X

by Joel Hruska - Fri, Nov 14, 2014

One of the disadvantages to buying an Apple system is that it generally means less upgradeability and flexibility than a system from a traditional PC OEM. Over the last few years, Apple has introduced features and adopted standards that made upgrading or using third-party hardware progressively more difficult. Now, with OS X 10.10 Yosemite, the company has taken another step down the path towards total vendor lock-in and effectively disabled support for third-party SSDs. We say "effectively" because while third-party SSDs will still work, they'll no longer perform the TRIM garbage collection command....

Micron M600 SATA & M.2 Solid State Drive Review

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, Sep 29, 2014

Samsung made some waves earlier this year with the introduction of its 850 Pro family of solid state drives and the first commercial use of 3D stacked NAND Flash memory. Micron is striking back today with a lower manufacturing process geometry in conventional NAND, however, and a new Flash technology it claims, will accelerate performance more effectively than other competing solutions. The new Micron M600 family of solid state drives will launch at capacities ranging from 128GB to 1TB across multiple form factors. Conventional 2.5” SATA drives, mSATA, and the PCIe-capable M.2 platform...

AMD Radeon R7 Series 240GB SSD Review

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Aug 19, 2014

AMD is launching a new family of products today, but unless you follow the rumor mill pretty closely, it’s probably not something you’d expect. It’s not a new CPU or APU. And it’s not a new GPU or memory kit either. Well then, “what could it be” you ask? Today, AMD is launching its first line of solid state drives (SSDs), targeted squarely at AMD enthusiasts. Whodathunkit? AMD is calling the new family of drives, the Radeon R7 Series SSD, similar to its popular mid-range line of graphics cards. The new Radeon R7 Series SSDs feature OCZ and Toshiba technology,...

OCZ ARC 100 240GB Solid State Drive Review

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Aug 13, 2014

OCZ is launching a brand-new series of solid state drives today, targeted squarely at budget-conscious, mainstream consumers. The new ARC 100 series doesn’t stray far from its roots, however. The ARC 100 features the very same OCZ Barefoot 3 M10 as the higher-end Vertex 460, but these new drives feature more affordable Toshiba A19nm NAND flash memory. The ARC 100 also ships without any sort of accessory bundle, to further bring costs down. We’ve got a 240GB OCZ ARC 100 in-house and have put it through an array of benchmarks, versus a number of other popular solid state drives....

Samsung SSD 845DC EVO Solid State Drive Review

by Marco Chiappetta - Thu, Aug 07, 2014

It was about a year ago that we first took a look at the Samsung SSD 840 EVO series of solid state drives. If you recall, those drives featured a new controller and the latest generation of Samsung’s TLC NAND flash memory, which allowed the company to offer the SSD 840 EVO series at very competitive prices, despite their relatively strong performance. Those the SSD 840 EVO series of drives was originally designed for client-PC applications, Samsung has since evolved and refined the design and deemed it suitable for read-centric enterprise applications. The Samsung SSD 845DC EVO series...