Most well known for their DRAM and USB drives, Patriot memory isn’t new to offering performance and gamer oriented products. Years ago, they jumped on the SSD bandwagon, but they seemed to fall off at one point or another. As of last two years, however, they hopped back on and they now offer SSDs for every segment of the market. …

Back in 2014 we took a good look at the Mushkin Reactor. At the time, it was the best value 1TB SSD you could buy. You could even argue that it was THE SSD which made high value, high capacity SSDs the norm. Now, Mushkin is trying to take value a step farther by introducing a cheaper alternative into the market. Instead of …

We had the opportunity last week to chat with Kevin Kilbuck, Micron’s director of NAND strategic planning, to discuss their current 3D NAND generation, as well as their future 3D NAND plans.  Not only for SSDs, data storage usage opportunites for NAND continue to grow in embedded markets, such as mobile devices, automotive, industrial and the Internet of Things. In …

You may recall that while we were in attendance at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show we met with Micron and Lexar to have a meet and greet with their latest products, one of which is the hardware we have on hand today, the Lexar USB 3.0 Portable SSD. FEATURES AND SPECIFICATIONS The purpose of this small and portable SSD is just that, …

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 …

A rather unfortunate and all too common thing we have seen throughout the years is substandard third party components within electronic equipment.  A perfect example might be a storage device in a laptop where, most often, the SSD choice has been poorly thought out by the company.  We have posted a lot of notebook and Ultrabook reviews throughout the years …

I find it a bit amusing that some 13 years since our first SSD review, flash technology is still at a point that we are trying to move the consumer from hard drive to SSD.  Knowing what we know about the difference between the two, It simply doesn’t make sense to me that PCs, especially laptops, are still selling with …

If you have been following us for awhile, you might remember our review of the Apricorn Aegis Secure Key 3 flash drive that we did back in August of 2016.  Back then, any flash drive at 480GB was something to get your hands on, much less one that would also qualify as one of the most secure flash drives worldwide.  …

It seems like it was just yesterday that I was holding the Crucial M4 in my hands and I was ready to upgrade my first gen i7 system with my first SSD ever, let alone with the first SATA 6Gb/s SSD ever. While my X58 motherboard had the latest SATA 6GB/s ports provided by Marvell chipset, those in the know …

You heard that right. This is the first time we are exploring RAM caching on an NVMe SSD in this fashion. While many RAM caching softwares exist, no other SSD manufacturer has yet to enable RAM caching for NVMe SSDs in quite the way Crucial has. Crucial’s Momentum Cache feature, part of Crucial Storage Executive, is unlocked for all NVMe …