Being niche in a dog eat dog tech market can be very risky. Being niche in the SSD industry is straight up crazy as NAND manufacturers price their SSDs so low that 3rd party SSD manufacturers find it very hard to compete; or they shut down.  More than a few companies have slowed, or shut down their SSD production and, …

Silicon Motion (SMI)  has met with success as of late with release of their  SM2246EN SATA 3 SSD controller.  It was just under a year ago that we sat with Robert Fan to discuss the future of SM2246EN, while today it can be found in the PNY Optima, Corsair LX, as well as the ADATA SP610 of this report. Our …

A few days ago, we released our review of the Intel SSD DC P3700 NVMe SSD.  This new entry to the enterprise market brought in just under 500K IOPS in a single PCB and single controller design package, a design not needing the traditional RAID solution to achieve performance above 2.5GB/s.  As much attention as it gained from the enterprise …

Intel is announcing the addition of three PCIe solid-state drive (SSD) solutions to its well-established data center family of storage products.  Intel’s SSD Data Center Family will now be offering both SATA and PCIe solutions in multiple endurance levels and multiple capacities, all featuring enterprise-class RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability)  features. The ongoing explosion of data storage requirements for data center …

The current PCIe add-in-card storage market is separated into two general architectures.  The first is ground-up, native PCIe designs, such as the Micron P320h.  These devices eschew a typical SATA/SAS controller in favor of specialized flash controllers that have native PCIe interfaces.  This is where the market is heading.  In fact, later this year, you should start to see many …

Integrated Device Technology (IDT) did well this week at Flash Memory Summit, demonstrating their 16 channel NVMe 1.0 standard PCIe SSD controller. The first publicly seen device of it’s type, the IDT controller is on the leading edge of the new NVMe standard. IDT is interested in selling their controllers to third parties rather than selling their own SSDs, but to …

The NVM Express working group has announced the release of Windows and Linux PCIe SSD drivers based on the NVM Express standard. The Windows driver was a collaborative effort of IDT, Intel, and LSI Sandforce and will be available under a BSD license. It will support all the mandatory features of the new spec. The Linux driver will be released …

Today Intels’ Robert Crooke, Corporate VP and GM of the NVM (Non-Volatile Memory) Solutions Group, delivered an impressive Keynote speech. To keep things in perspective, one must recall that Intel has been in the SSD Flash manufacturing market for some time.  Intel has been developing this type of solution since 1992 and time has brought about many changes and advancements. …

Sabrent has just released an upgraded version of their Rocket CFX CFExpress B Memory Cards and added the name PRO to make sure they are a distinct entry in the storage space.  They are available in   512GB, 1 and 2TB and we have had the opportunity to spend some time with all three.  Performance is rated at 1800MB/s read and …

Several weeks ago, Lexar sent us their biggest and brightest 2TB Lexar Professional Gold CFExpress B Card and, well, it has found a permanent home in my Canon EOS R5 mirrorless digital full frame.  That wasn’t an easy feat considering I had relied solely on the ProGrade Cobalt 650GB card since its release 2 1/2 years ago, but this Lexar …