Tag Archives: PCMark Vantage

Looking back ten years or so to when SSDs were introduced, I would have never have believed that hard drives would still be the main system storage choice this far down the line.  They are larger, slower, noisier, require more power which results in less portable battery life, lack security and endurance, and their performance is significantly less than an …

It was only a few days back that we reviewed the HP EX920 NVMe SSD at the 1TB capacity and determined that it held an absolutely great price point for the performance it presented.  Today, we are taking a look at the little brother to that SSD, the HP EX900 NVMe which HP hopes will hit a home run when …

High performance, low power, increased system responsiveness, high reliability, small form factor, minimum weight, enhanced ruggedness along with high data integrity and security; these are the selling points made by HP with respect to their newest HP EX920 M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD.  As much as this description might fit any of the latest gen M.2 SSD family, HP …

It has been some time now since Intel introduced VROC (Virtual RAID on CPU) and VROC provides for a capability on our motherboards that all would have hoped to see some time ago; the ability to create a bootable RAID configuration.   At the consumer and enthusiast level, VROC is only available in newer X299 chipset motherboards at present, and these …

If you are in touch with storage technology at all, Intel Optane will be familiar to you and, in fact, we have even gone so far as to describe it as a ‘game changer’ or ‘disruptive technology’ in a previous report.  If you are not ‘up to spec’ on the ins and outs of storage, let’s just say that SSDs …

There comes a time when we all just need to stop, sit back and think; take a look around and reassess our direction perhaps.  The SSD industry is a beautiful example of this.  SSDs were introduced some 11 years ago now, although flash technology had been in use prior.  Today, there isn’t a person in the world that hasn’t been …

For a media professional, data transfer is everything.  The faster one can move and manipulate media, the more efficient the machine becomes.  We take it for granted really but the massive work to perfect everything you watch on TV is incredible… and the ability to move media quickly is central to efficiency.  This is where Thunderbolt 3 comes in.  TB3 …

It was only a few weeks ago that ASRock announced their newest Ultra Quad M.2 Card, yet today we have it in hand and tested.  The ASRock Ultra Quad M.2 Card bears a striking resemblance to the HighPoint SSD7101 RAID Controller we tested a few months back… but there are some very distinct differences that we will point out in …

To give you an idea how far we have come in solid-state storage, the very first notebook sold with an SSD was the Dell XPS M1330.  It shipped with the Sandisk u5000  (my first and very embarrassing review) SATA2 32GB SSD, an SSD that would gain infamy as the first ‘stuttering SSD’ and, back then, storage capacity wasn’t an option. …

It was some time ago that even the mention of TLC NAND flash memory could draw forum confrontations so active that they would inflame contributors, most threads containing language that we definitely wouldn’t want children hearing…or reading in that case.  Luckily, NAND flash memory has progressed.  In fact, this progression is very ‘consumer-centric’ as today’s SSDs, built on the newest 64-layer 3D TLC …