Our SSD Reviews

Perhaps the two most notable recent trends in SSDs have been the inevitable introduction of M.2 SSDs and the unexpected announcements of ‘driverless’ PCIe SSDs, that require no more than inserting the device into an available PCIe slot and rebooting the PC system. Very close and long-standing industry relations placed us in a position to provide exclusive analysis and report …

When it comes to SSD controllers, up until recent times LSI/SandForce and Marvell have pretty much “ruled the roost”.    Other than a few instances of utilizing proprietary controllers (such as Samsung does in most of their SSDs), and a smaller player in Indilinx (acquired by OCZ),  there were no other options for manufacturers to engineer a new SSD with.  That has …

A few weeks back, we posted an article that stated our opinion of the new Apple MBA as being one of the top ultraportable laptops available today, and quite possibly, untouchable.  The backlash from Sony fans was amazing, many clearly noting that we hadn’t tested, or included, the new VAIO 13 Pro as a comparison system in that report…and they …

When it comes to high performance RAID add-in cards, there are really only two big players in the market: Adaptec and LSI.  These two have been duking it out for years, each one constantly trying to one up the other, with LSI often coming out on top.  To give you a bit of history, lets take a look back at …

Our attendance at the Samsung Global SSD Summit in South Korea brought us a first glimpse of a new standard in ultrabook storage performance.  At the Summit, the Samsung XP941 M.2 PCIe SSD was displayed reaching 1GB/s transfer speeds and Apple has since released their 2013 MacBook Air which has a customized variation of the XP941; this attaining native performance of …

Imagine that you could simply plug a PCIe SSD into your PC and immediately realize performance of over 2GB/s data transfer speeds.  For the average PC user that may not seem like much, but for the media professional, or even enthusiast, being able to manipulate and move large amounts of media in seconds can save both time and money, as …

PCIe SSDs are a funny animal as they have been out for a few years yet haven’t really caught on just yet. They are very limited to either very expensive and system specific enterprise variations or require driver installation that isn’t always as simple as instructions seem. We have yet to see an affordable plug and play PCIe SSD solution …

The Micron P420m, announced earlier this summer, is a half-height, half-length (HHHL) PCIe storage device that augments Micron’s PCIe enterprise storage line. The P420m has a lot to live up to. If you remember back to last October, we reviewed the Micron P320h and came away thoroughly impressed. Massive amounts of speed, endurance and parallelism were at our disposal. With …

NGFF stands for ‘Next Generation Form Factor’ and was a working name for the new generation of PCIe solid state drives, now affectionately known as M.2 SSDs. While many imagined the M.2 to be industry standardization for mSATA and similar small SSDs today seen in ultrabooks, a closer look at PCIe demonstrates that unbelievable performance will soon be seen in …

So our friends at KingSpec held true to their offer and we just received a brand new KingSpec PCIe SSD from the courier.  This SSD is so new that there aren’t even data sheets available and you won’t find this on the KingSpec site just yet.  Availability to distributors only occurred a few days ago. Specs for the MC2J677M1T list …