Tag Archives: TxBench

One of the biggest advances at the forefront of digital technology in the past few years has to do with data storage and the introduction of CFExpress cards.  As an avid photographer and digital enthusiast, myself… I wonder what took so long and… in fact, I wonder why the digital industry has lagged so far behind when we consider the …

I get asked quite often what I prefer with respect to storage cards in my camera equipment.  I try to stay away from exact brands and move the conversation into what I believe are necessary characteristics of the cards that I will put in my digital equipment.  Three things stand out.   I want storage that has high sustained write speeds …

The Samsung Portable T7 Shield is a USB 3.2 Gen 2 SSD that will transfer data at up to 1GB/s with capacities up to 2TB, a decent price point and 3-year warranty.

To say that CFExpress Type B cards haven’t redefined digital media in the past two years would be an understatement.  Many enjoy their advantages in moving large photo and video files from the card to PC for work in a fraction of the time that it used to take, but more importantly, its what CFExpress B cards do inside the …

If you are a gamer or media manipulator, data transfer speeds are key.  There are two options that speak to data transfer speed in external storage, these being Thunderbolt 3/4 or the newest USB 3.2.  We see fairly few Thunderbolt devices these days as they are the more expensive of the two when considering external SSDs.  They are faster, however. …

Gen 4 SSDs have become common place as of late and manufacturers have elected to rely on the Phison E18 PCIe 4.0 NVMe controller, and for good reason.  It is a top tier controller with performance that provides 7GB/s throughput and over 1 million IOPS and, most recently, we even identified an SSD with this controller as being a ‘game …

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 …