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 …

For what seemed like an eternity Samsung has been the leader in manufacturing 3D NAND. Starting with the release of the Samsung 850 Pro two years ago, they have paved the way for innovation. 3D NAND brings greater capacity, power efficiency, and lower cost to the consumers. After first announcing their 32-Layer 3D NAND last year in March, we have been …

Marvell, a world-leading producer of storage, cloud infrastructure, Internet of Things (IoT), multimedia and connectivity semiconductor devices, is announcing the Marvell 88RC13XX family of high-performance RAID storage controllers.  This new series has a full set of features that include eight 6Gb/s SATA ports, four lanes of PCI Express 3.0 and a 10Gb/s USB 3.1 device port with type-C connector support.  …

As the SSD industry continues to grow, manufacturers try to maintain their consumer presence with more value-oriented consumer products.  Such is the case with Intel’s latest step into the TLC segment by introducing their newest 540s SATA 3 SSD a few weeks back. The Intel 540s Series is their first SSD to feature 16nm TLC NAND and first 5 series …

We’ve been able to test our fair share of SSDs over the years and, to this date, there remains a constant.  Prices drop.  Where we once saw a 32GB SSD peak at $5000 in 2007, today’s world is vastly different and 1TB SSDs are now available at just over the $300 mark.   Value is key in technology and has always …

Considering my rather vocal opposition to Apple’s products over the years, it’s somewhat amusing that I make daily use of a 27″ iMac, MBA and new iPhone.  It is not so much the product as it is internal decisions on build that bothers me, my present MBA being the longest I have ever kept a laptop, eliminating any question whatsoever …

On Tuesday Micron Technology, Inc. introduced to us new NVMe SSDs for the enterprise market, however, that was just one of many announcements. They also announced the creation of Micron Accelerated Solutions, a set of purpose-built, scale-out solutions for open source and software-defined data centers. The first suite of Micron Accelerated Solutions are designed and developed in close collaboration with …

Intel Corporation is announcing their first dual-port PCI Express (PCIe) SSDs that utilize the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) protocol.  The dual-port design of the new Intel SSD DC D3700 and D3600 series provides failover and redundancy, which are critical in safeguarding against data loss.  Systems utilizing the D3700 can realize up to a 6 X performance increase as compared to …

The Open Compute Project Summit 2016 was held earlier this month in San Jose, CA, and Seagate was there demonstrating the fastest-ever SSD flash drive.  What they were demoing was a production-ready solid-state drive (SSD) with throughput performance of 10 GB/s.  This early unit meets Open Compute Project (OCP) specifications, creating an ideal solution for hyperscale data centers seeking to …

Another product that we were introduced to at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show was the Lexar Professional UHS-II Class 10 U3 microSDXC card. This microSDXC card was designed with the sole purpose of replacing any microSD card you are currently using in any tablet, smartphone, drone, or action camera. WHAT IS SDXC? – SD CARD PERFORMANCE First, there are a …