Tag Archives: evaluation

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 …

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 …

We have been testing a new SSD that is about to be introduced by XPG and something about this SSD caught our eye.  It is in the XPG marketing pitch actually. A highlight of this marketing states that the XPG GAMMIX S70 Blade NVMe Gen 4 SSD is ‘Perfect for Compact and Thin Devices’ and that this SSD is ‘Cool …

It was only a matter of time until SSDs really got hooked into the gaming scene and today, there isn’t a gamer around without flash media overseeing the storage of their gaming system.  Seagate released their FireCuda 520 back in  December of 2019 with the ‘FireCuda Gaming’ label and today we are reporting on their latest release, the FireCuda 530 …

Much has changed in PC sales through the years, yet much is the same.  Things can be unpredictable.  Looking back, there have been instances of manufacturers selling their own brand laptops and ultra books equipped with competitors SSDs as storage, simply to maximize sales of their own higher cost…and higher performing SSDs. In fact, if you think you are getting …

On our Test Bench today is the newest Intel SSD Optane P5800X PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD and we must say that we are pretty impressed.  In fact, I am left with a lingering question as to whether this level of performance will even be attainable by others?  This SSD is just that good. Intel’s secret weapon. We are saying this …

Just about this time two years ago, we posted our report on the Intel H10 Optane Memory SSD and benefits it could bring to your everyday PC use. A quick review of that report might be a great start here as it provides an in depth look at SSD hot caching and what hot caching does for your system. Briefly, …

Mushkin has introduced a new SSD and it is a PCIe 4.0 SSD, aptly named the Mushkin Gamma.  The Mushkin Gamma is based on the ever popular Phison E18 NVMe Gen 4 controller and reaches speeds above 7GB/s.  Since the introduction of PCIe 4.0 some time ago, we have really seen three levels of Gen 4, these being low power …

If there is anything the storage industry has gotten wrong, it would be its approach to educating the consumer on storage speeds and their importance.  As much as we would like to get into advertised flash performance specs which, for the most part are a total fallacy in relating the actual speed that data moves, today we are going to …