Advance in flash technology enables larger capacities to be attained in smaller SSDs such as the M.2.  When it all started in 2007, consumer SSD storage maxed out at 32GB with the SanDisk U5000 SSD.  That SSD in a Dell XPS started it all for us in fact, and that was a 2.5″ 9mm thick notebook SSD, something that has …

One of the most obvious changes in moving from PCIe3 to PCIe4 SSDs has been the heat itself.  We actually find it a bit unique, as AMD Ryzen and Intel 11th Gen laptops and ultrabooks have been out for some time, but they contain the much cooler PCIe3 SSDs.  It is no different in desktop use as there isn’t a …

We are often amused at the progression of SSDs throughout the years.  Even today, check anywhere and you can easily find information on the fastest SSD, or even the highest capacity SSD, but what about SSD form factors?  Form factor progression has seen SATA 3 notebook SSDs grow into to PCIe SSDs, AIC, mSATA, U2 and then to what was …

I might be getting a bit old but I miss the introductory handshake or hug of our traditional CES meetings along with the personal nature of one on one conversation.  We have entered a new era that isn’t changing anytime soon and we have no choice but to hang on for the ride and make the best of things right …

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 …

Thunderbolt 3 has been around for some time now and is the preferred choice by so many media professionals. Its data transfer speeds might reach 2.8GB/s but, more importantly, Thunderbolt 3 can be daisy chained and its 40Gbps speeds allow countless different methods of port transfer simultaneously.  Because of this, the concept of external docks allows much more in a …

On our test bench today is the TeamGroup T-FORCE CARDEA Ceramic C440 Gen 4 NVMe M.2 SSD.  This SSD sports an off-white color pattern with gold branding and is a bit different than other SSDs we have tested, in that it contains a ceramic plate heatsink.  This is a bit unusual as, well at least until Sabrent came along with …

Gen 4 SSDs have been available for just over a year now and the two most talked about characteristics just happen to speak to the good and the bad. The good of course has had us watching storage speeds jumping from 3.5GB/s to 5GB/s and now 7GB/s becoming the norm. The bad is the fact that Gen 4 necessitated additional …

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 …