Tag Archives: Anvil

There seems to be much confusion with respect to USB speeds these days, and it’s all the result of the newest USB 3.2 Gen 2 design.  The standard for the newest USB release is USB 3.2 Gen 2 which will attain data transfer speed of 10Gbps (1GB/s) with newer compatible systems.  A step up from that is USB 3.2 Gen …

Recommend a DRAM-less SSD on any website forum or product purchase site and you have just committed storage suicide.  There is a ‘cancel-culture’ that will hunt you down and ensure that you never post without their jumping in ever again.  People who have never had a DRAM-less SSD in their hand will hound you endlessly because, well, Linus said not …

Many many not consider how SSDs have changed from generation to generation but, throughout the years, the push forward has been increased on capacity and top tier performance.  In order to achieve a larger capacity, the flash memory footprint has to be reduced and layers stacked, much like we see in apartment buildings, for the most part.  The challenge of …

Perhaps one of the most admirable traits about ADATA and their gaming brand XPG throughout the years is their willingness to incorporate a wide range of SSD components in their products.  We don’t think that there is another that comes remotely close, most latching on to a certain manufacturer and establishing long lasting partnerships.  Thistrait  is the case with respect …

Advance in flash technology enables larger capacities to be attained in smaller SSDs such as the M.2.  When it all started in 2007, consumer SSD storage maxed out at 32GB with the SanDisk U5000 SSD.  That SSD in a Dell XPS started it all for us in fact, and that was a 2.5″ 9mm thick notebook SSD, something that has …

One of the most obvious changes in moving from PCIe3 to PCIe4 SSDs has been the heat itself.  We actually find it a bit unique, as AMD Ryzen and Intel 11th Gen laptops and ultrabooks have been out for some time, but they contain the much cooler PCIe3 SSDs.  It is no different in desktop use as there isn’t a …

This morning at CES (virtually), Western Digital has announced increased capacities in some of their top external storage devices, the My Passport SSD, the SanDisk Extreme and Extreme Pro, as well as their WD_Black P50 Game Drive NVMe SSD.  All four of these portable SSDs are going to be released in 4TB capacities by the end of February.  We have …

Gen 4 SSDs have been available for just over a year now and the two most talked about characteristics just happen to speak to the good and the bad. The good of course has had us watching storage speeds jumping from 3.5GB/s to 5GB/s and now 7GB/s becoming the norm. The bad is the fact that Gen 4 necessitated additional …

UPDATED – This report has been updated as, during our first report of the WD_Black P50, we had observed very low and inconsistent data transfer patterns in our true data testing.  As a result of that first report, Western Digital sent new firmware and stated that new products would be shipped with the new firmware and product owners would be …

Just when things seem to be shaping up in the world of SSDs, an unexpected entry always seems to appear.  This is the case with the Western Digital Black SN850 NVMe SSD we have on the bench today, and many might say that we really never saw this coming.  Like a freight train…  We were all just so excited to …