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 …

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.  …

So I was in a conversation this week where many were speaking of the success of the Phison E18 controller and I stepped away from the crowd for a bit and had to ask, “Yes but will this last?”  Historically, we have watched different SSD companies, and more specifically, third party SSD controller companies step into the limelight with a …

Perhaps one of the odd ducks in the SSD space has always been Plextor.  Their SSDs have always been amongst the best, but for some reason, they never gained the recognition they deserved.  That’s not just my thought I am sure as reviewers historically have had nothing but good to say about Plextor SSDs.  They are one of the very …

We have been testing a new SSD that is about to be introduced by XPG and something about this SSD caught our eye.  It is in the XPG marketing pitch actually. A highlight of this marketing states that the XPG GAMMIX S70 Blade NVMe Gen 4 SSD is ‘Perfect for Compact and Thin Devices’ and that this SSD is ‘Cool …

It was only a matter of time until SSDs really got hooked into the gaming scene and today, there isn’t a gamer around without flash media overseeing the storage of their gaming system.  Seagate released their FireCuda 520 back in  December of 2019 with the ‘FireCuda Gaming’ label and today we are reporting on their latest release, the FireCuda 530 …

Over the past few months, there has been much discussion as to when we will start seeing Micron’s newest B47R Fortis 3D TLC memory inside an SSD, and exactly who would do it first. Kudos to Phison. For those not familiar with this memory, B47R is Micron’s latest 176-Layer 3D TLC premium NAND flash memory which is able to achieve …

Mushkin has introduced a new SSD and it is a PCIe 4.0 SSD, aptly named the Mushkin Gamma.  The Mushkin Gamma is based on the ever popular Phison E18 NVMe Gen 4 controller and reaches speeds above 7GB/s.  Since the introduction of PCIe 4.0 some time ago, we have really seen three levels of Gen 4, these being low power …

TeamGroup has introduced a brand new PCIe 4 SSD to the market, one with much the same physical components as the Patriot Viper VP4100 and Sabrent Rocket Gen 4 SSDs introduced some time ago.  Our look at the T-Create today will be on a fresh new Test Bench, and one in which we had hoped would become part of our …