Our SSD Reviews

A lot has changed since the announcement of the Optimus Eco earlier this year.  The most notable change is the company supplying it.  When we last looked into SMART Storage Systems, they had just finished being acquired by SanDisk.  At that point, though, nothing had really changed except for ‘a SanDisk Company’ being added to their name.  Many were unsure exactly …

If you have been following The SSD Review in 2013, you are probably familiar with our coverage of 12Gbps SAS.  Throughout the year we have covered HBAs, RAID Adapters, Enclosures and SSDs.  We have been incredibly busy reviewing new products, but one product in particular has stood out.  In all of our 12Gbps SAS reviews we have sung the praises …

Toshiba is a world leader in many different technologies and applications.  In the NAND market, for instance, they supply components for some of our favorite SSDs.  But, they haven’t really been known as a major player in turn-key storage products.  While they have an impressive offering of mechanical drives, especially for automotive and industrial uses, they are dwarfed by the …

Marketing of PCI Express SSDs has always been somewhat tricky as the fine balance between performance and value wasn’t much of a balance at all; performance being the obvious strongpoint of these cards.  The difficulty in manufacturing a consumer directed PCIe SSD, that can promise value, has most likely been the reason all haven’t jumped aboard the ‘PCI Express’. VisionTek …

The advent of M.2 SSDs holds the promise of eliminating the SATA bottleneck and, while it may not seem that big of a deal for the typical consumer, improved performance to a media professional is pure gold.  Faster transfer speeds translate into quicker job completion which realizes increased business and higher revenue.  Although we have had M.2 SSDs in hand …

Over the past while, there seems to be an increased interest in our M.2 SSD testing, whether it be with respect to our thoughts on M.2 placement in the industry, ideas on how it best be introduced, or just plain “Where can I get a M.2 SSD?” concerns.  Unfortunately, we cannot elaborate on purchase ‘just yet’ but we thought we …

So I am a few thousand miles above beautiful California and the 2013 LSI Accelerating Innovations Summit. I can’t help but reflect on the confusion that still exists concerning the standardization of M.2 SSDs, regardless of how many times we try to explain this in our reports (1, 2, 3).  If you are confused and not an industry professional, don’t …

A few weeks ago we received an e-mail asking our opinion on the VisionTek mSATA SSD as the writer had found an amazing deal on that SSD, yet there wasn’t a review in site.  Admittedly, even I wasn’t all that familiar with VisionTek and didn’t even know they were marketing SSDs. In conducting a quick search, I had to laugh …

ADATA recently announced availability of their new DashDrive Elite SE720 External SSD and sent one along to us for analysis.  Without stealing the thunder of this entire report, the SE720 is ultrathin, extremely well-built, has LSI SandForce speeds and we were floored at the Amazon pricing we found that brought this external SSD below that of many similar bare 128GB …

When we started receiving 12Gbps SAS products in the summer of 2013, we were met with typical products such as the Adaptec ASR-8885 RAID Adapter, the LSI SAS 9300-8e HBA and the HGST SSD800MM SSD.  Each of these products delivered excellent performance that far outpaced the 6Gbps versions that they were built on.  But, in order to have a full …