Tag Archives: analysis

It is said that 2015 will be the year of the M.2 SSD form factor and, by all indications, this assumption seems to be correct.  This is a very big plus for the SSD industry, as well as a very clear demonstration of the progress we have made in flash technology within the last few years.  For instance, our Patriot …

Controllers are the heart and soul of every SSD. Without one, an SSD would be a useless PCB with some components slapped on it. It is responsible for everything from garbage collection and wear leveling to error correction and hardware encryption. In simple terms, all these operations can be quite complicated to implement as well as expensive to develop. This …

Our SSD of the Week series became a little side tracked over the past few weeks. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals going on, almost any SSD was a good buy. Now however, prices are back where they should be and the holidays are just around the corner. If you weren’t lucky enough to score a good deal yet, …

If we were to look at the flash controller hierarchy, Phison has typically placed as a mid-tier company.  We met with Phison at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California, this past August and they spoke of a new controller that might move them up in the stack, the Phison Quad-Core PS3110 6Gbps controller.  Capable of 550MB/s read, 530MB/s …

When we reviewed  the Intel SSD DC P3700 earlier this year, it was our first chance to get a really good look at what NVMe could do for storage.  As a quick refresher, Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) is a protocol that is set to replace AHCI for storage.  It leverages PCIe as the physical interconnect, specifically PCIe x4 Gen3, which …

If you are going to introduce a new motherboard to the world, perhaps the best marketing feat one could achieve would be to set a new overclocking world record for that board close to the time of its release.  Nick Shih of ASRock did that with the new ASRock X99 OC Formula recently by overclocking the latest Intel i7-5960X chip …

In examining the flash industry over the past eight years, I don’t think many would argue that there has been insurmountable growth, paired with enough growing pains and obstacles along the way to frustrate even the best in the business.  Flash technology has grown so fast that today it would be seemingly impossible to find anyone not tied to flash …

SSDs have been around for several years now, but some could argue that they have yet to hit mainstream.  When you compare SSD sales today to the hard drive, we could make a case when we state that they are still in their infancy.  The biggest reasoning for this, of course, has been industries lack of ability to find that …

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, …

It has been quite a while since we have seen a value oriented SSD from OCZ. Their last two releases where the Vector 150 and the Vertex 460, the latest updates to their enthusiast and mainstream drive lines. The market need for value drives is very apparent when we consider the popularity that the Samsung 840 EVO and Crucial MX100 …