Once upon a time, I sat with a company questioning them as to why they were so hesitant to market a 1TB SSD; they wouldn’t push that 512GB barrier.  Their honest and frank response was simply, “Why sell very few of a product that costs more to build when we can sell much more of what is in demand at …

The WD_Black gaming line has been around for some time now and we have been fortunate to report on several items in the past few years.  Admittedly, my personal favorite was one of the first, the WD_Black AN1500 which was well before its time as an add-in card that could hit speeds of 6GB/s and was bootable…to boot. The one …

There is a long standing belief that buying a DRAM-less SSD is just wrong.  As much as this might hold water prior to and for those users not using Windows 10, it doesn’t for those looking for value and performance in storage today.  Without getting too complicated, NVMe and Windows 10 allow the SSD to create a Host Memory Buffer …

It is a bit amusing how we might be speaking of the merits and oversights of a new product in the tech industry, and only a few days later something very similar turns up.  In this case it has to do exactly with this latest product to hit our Test Bench, the WD_Black D50 1TB SSD Gaming Dock where, a …

This morning at CES (virtually), Western Digital has announced increased capacities in some of their top external storage devices, the My Passport SSD, the SanDisk Extreme and Extreme Pro, as well as their WD_Black P50 Game Drive NVMe SSD.  All four of these portable SSDs are going to be released in 4TB capacities by the end of February.  We have …

UPDATED – This report has been updated as, during our first report of the WD_Black P50, we had observed very low and inconsistent data transfer patterns in our true data testing.  As a result of that first report, Western Digital sent new firmware and stated that new products would be shipped with the new firmware and product owners would be …

Just when things seem to be shaping up in the world of SSDs, an unexpected entry always seems to appear.  This is the case with the Western Digital Black SN850 NVMe SSD we have on the bench today, and many might say that we really never saw this coming.  Like a freight train…  We were all just so excited to …

Sometimes small things surprise us.  Samsung just pulled this off with their newest T7 Shield which has just been released in a massive 4TB capacity.  You see… this is not typical of Samsung to push out such high capacity storage as it goes against their business model.  I know this as I had a very lengthy conversation with Samsung in …

DRAMless SSDs are somewhat of an odd duck in the SSD world, yet they consistently reappear.   Ask anyone on any forum if DRAMless SSDs are a viable option for a main storage medium could be considered picking a fight.  There are hard pressed views and, as a rather long-standing solid state drive reviewer, my views haven’t always gone with the …

Happens to even the best of us.  Last week, I had an SSD crash of my main PC and shortly after learned that my back-up wasn’t going to work and my secondary back-up set me back 2-years.  Considering my love of photography and all things digital, that was a MASSIVE loss.  Sitting right beside my PC was SanDisk’s newest SanDisk …