At least to me, it’s rather amazing how one of the most progressive inventions historically has been overlooked.  It is not electricity.  It is not the light bulb and it isn’t the telephone but you can bet that it plays a massive role within each in every moment of our lives.  It is NAND flash and NAND was invented by …

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 …

Gen 4 SSDs have become common place as of late and manufacturers have elected to rely on the Phison E18 PCIe 4.0 NVMe controller, and for good reason.  It is a top tier controller with performance that provides 7GB/s throughput and over 1 million IOPS and, most recently, we even identified an SSD with this controller as being a ‘game …

An unexpected surprise arrived at our offices this Christmas break in the guise of a PCIe 4.0 DRAM-less SSD.  It was only a matter of time but there has been some clever thought put into this drive.  It is the ADATA XPG Atom 50 Gen 4 SSD and two things that stand out are that it is a single-sided SSD, …

One of the oldest names in SSDs is Kingston.  One might not expect such as Kingston, by all sense of the term, is a third party manufacturer…or distributor.  Unlike Samsung, WD/SanDisk, Intel, Kioxia, Micron, SKHynix and a few others, they do not actually own a fab that ‘grows’ the silicon ingots to manufacture NAND wafers.  Unbelievably, the original Kingston SSDNow …

On our test Bench today is the Silicon Power XD80 PCIe 3.0 NVMe M.2 SSD.  It is a 2TB capacity and claims to bring us top Gen 3 speeds with a lower price point and at lower temperatures, 20% lower actually.  The XD80 comes with its own metal heatsink attached, something we really never saw with many Gen 3 SSDs.  …

Only once before had we ever reviewed an SSD that only contained a single controller and a single NAND chip; this was the Samsung 980 DRAM-less SSD.  Much like the 980, our SSD today is a 1TB SSD that is DRAM-less and hits over 3GB/s read and write with a price point of just over a hundred bucks. Direct competition…oh …

The Innogrit Ranier Gen4 NVMe SSD controller has met with much success since the company officially came out of stealth mode.   The success of this controller is testament to the experience within the company.  Their management team is led by their CEO Dr. Zining Wu who served as Chief Technology Officer before leaving Marvell, most of his Management Team following …

The popularity of CFExpress Type B cards has been overwhelming over the past year and we are certain that it will continue to grow as newer digital equipment is released with this type of storage in mind.  It moves us from under 100MB/s data transfer speed for most up to over 5x that with CFExpress highs of 1700MB/s.  Don’t get …

Type B CFExpress cards have gained massive popularity as of late  but what about CFExpress Type A.  Has it been forgotten?  The unfortunate reality of CFExpress Type A cards is that they are a very niche product limited to very few Sony cameras; the Sony a7S III, FX3 and Fx6 specifically. If it’s a professional DSLR that has CFExpress storage, …