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 …

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 …

A rather interesting entry into the SSD world by KIOXIA as of late has many businesses watching closely.  The KIOXIA FL6 enters the same space as both the Samsung Z-NAND and Intel Optane SSDs and many believe the KIOXIA entry may make quite the impression with respect to comparable pricing.  Rather unique is the fact that the FL6 is KIOXIA’s …

If there is anything we have learned about Micron/Crucial over the years, it is that they like to sit in the weeds.  Never really being the first to jump out with a new product, the Crucial norm is to slip a product into the market once the market has become comfortable at that level.  When considering the success Crucial/Micron has …

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 …

It isn’t often that we receive review samples of the same product from both the chip and product manufacturers within days, but such is the case with this report.  In this instance, it is a very good thing as we are reviewing the Kingston XS2000 Portable SSD and this is a permanently enclosed unit, whereas we have also received the …