Every year or so, we try to upgrade our hardware to stay current with tech trends and bumping our newest test bench up to the new Kaby Lake design was no different.  With Intel’ newest Optane Technology knocking at the door, the Z270 was a must.  If you are wondering whether the boot to Z270 is worth the jump from Z170, …

When talking about high-performance storage and the controllers that power them, you can be sure that Phison will be in the conversation. Many companies have taken advantage of their E7 NVMe controller to bring out enthusiast class SSDs, such as the Patriot Hellfire, Corsair MP500, and MyDigitalSSD BPX (all of which are in our queue to review). But, as times are moving, Phison …

This week we met with Larry O’Connor, Founder and CEO of Other World Computing (OWC). Much of OWC’s success has been as a provider of storage upgrade solutions for Apple-made computing devices.  Our meeting in a suite at the Venetian was to view and discuss OWC’s latest offerings and plans. Apple has had a bit of a history of producing computing …

We had the opportunity this week to meet with LiteOn/Plextor in a suite at the Bellagio. We were shown a presentation outlining the history of LiteOn and Plextor, as well as all of their relevant technologies and future products roadmap. Many people have never heard of LiteOn, as many of their products are sold to OEMs to use in their …

CES 2017 and all the chaos that comes with it has just begun. One of our first booth tours is with Kingston, where they just revealed the world’s largest flash drive, the DataTraveler Ultimate GT. Just how big is this flash drive? It comes in 1TB and 2TB in capacities! Made out of a zinc alloy metal casing and high-density …

Mangstor is announcing a new non-volatile memory storage solution at this week’s VMworld 2016 Europe in Barcelona Spain.  The NX6325 NVMe over fabric storage array is capable of 100Gb/s interconnect speeds over RDMA networks.  Mangstor, which is a member of the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Partner Ready for OEM program, has developed the NX6325 based on the HPE ProLiant DL380 …

SMART Modular Technologies, a leading producer of memory and storage devices, is announcing availability of samples of their new 32GB DDR4 NVDIMM-N, representing the highest density DDR4 NVDIMM-N module available in the industry today.  SMART will begin shipping samples at the end of August 2016.  This new 32GB density module dramatically improves application performance, creating an ideal solution for storage …

This week Western Digital Corp. announced that it has successfully developed its next generation 3D NAND technology, BiCS3, with 64 layers of vertical storage capability. Pilot production of the new technology has commenced in the Yokkaichi, Japan joint venture facilities and initial output is expected later this year. Western Digital expects meaningful commercial volumes of BiCS3 in the first half …

For those that shoot in RAW… The timing of this card could not be more perfect.  Although I had been a camera enthusiast for years, admittedly I was lazy.  I liked to stick to presets and typical JPG output in an environment where the quicker I can get the file from my camera to ‘published’ the better.  All that changed …

Listing any product as the worlds best is just asking for trouble.  I did just that a few years back when I made the switch from PC to the Apple MacBook Air. The MBA achieved those accolades thanks to Samsung who supplied Apple with their PCIe SSD, even before equipping their own ultrabooks.  The industry has since forgotten to educate …