Items tagged with Solid State Drive
By now, everyone with even the vaguest of interest in PC technology can tell you how much snappier solid state drives are than even the fastest of spinning disks of yesteryear. There have been some interesting wrinkles recently, like ultra-high speed drives that ride the PCI Express 4.0 bus, but in test after test, regardless of drive type, just having a modern SSD offers enough of a boost to make an older PC feel new again. Similarly, it's basically a necessity to slap an SSD like one of the ADATA drives we'll be showing you here, into a new system build to not make any big sacrifices in responsiveness. Today, we're going to look at a pair of 1 TB SSDs from ADATA: the Swordfish and the Falcon....
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Kingston recently released its DC1000M series of solid-state drives for data center applications, capped off by a massive 7.68TB model. The DC1000M series leverages a hot-pluggable U.2 (2.5”, 15mm) form factor, that’s compatible with U.2 backplanes and the drives target mixed-use, data-intensive workloads, including Cloud computing, web hosting, high-performance computing (HPC), virtual infrastructures, and AI and deep learning applications. There are four drives in the initial Kingston DC1000M family, bookended by a 960GB model and the aforementioned 7.68TB behemoth. We’ve got a 3.84TB model on hand, which we’ll be showing you here. If you peruse the drives’ main...
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It's been nine months since AMD unleashed its Zen 2 processors and, more importantly as it related to this article, the X570 chipset with its PCI Express 4 connectivity, into the world. In the time since then, there hasn't been a torrent of extra-fast flash released by all that many storage vendors; even at launch, we only had Gigabyte's Aorus PCIe 4 SSD on hand to test. Considering that Gigabyte's drive could far outstrip the bandwidth available in PCI Express 3.0 x4 drives, while putting up some solid IOPs figures, it seems that those who feel a need for speed would want these drives, assuming they had a motherboard with a processor and chipset capable of pushing it to the limit. That seeming...
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Addlink isn't a particularly well-known manufacturer in the PC storage space, but the company has been in the business for a little over a decade. Online shops carry all sorts of flash memory products from Addlink, from micro SD cards to PCI-Express 4.0 solid state drives, and all points in between. However, just because you may not be as familiar with a certain brand or product doesn't mean it's not worth paying attention to. At the risk of giving away the conclusion in the first paragraph of this review, we dare say that Addlink's S70 M.2 SSD is one of those situations. As you'll see in the features and specifications list below, the S70 targets some pretty lofty theoretical figures for a drive...
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Kingston recently expanded its portfolio of solid state drives, with a new family of products targeting high-performance desktop and workstation applications. The Kingston KC2000 series of drives feature a PCI Express Gen 3.0 x 4 controller, 96-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory, and boast of peak transfer speeds north of 3GB/s. The drives are offered in an array of capacities, ranging from 250GB all the way on up to 2TB, and they support a number of security-conscious features as well. All told, the Kingston KC2000 series drives try to cater to a myriad of use cases, from mainstream consumer desktops, to gamers and enthusiasts, and workstation users. Whether or not Kingston pulled it off remains...
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Companies are getting a jump on Computex by announcing a spattering of upcoming products ahead of the event, which gets underway on Tuesday, May 28. Count Gigabyte among them. One of the things Gigabyte plans to show off is a new solid state, though it's not like any SSD that is currently available. How so? According to Gigabyte, it's the world's first PCI Express 4.0 M.2 SSD. There is a bit to unpack among all that technobabble, so lets get started. M.2 refers to the form factor. Unlike 2.5-inch SSDs that require a power cable and SATA cable, M.2 drives are those gum stick-sized SSDs that plug directly into the motherboard, provided it has an M.2 slot. These can be either SATA or NVMe. An example...
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Your next solid state drive (SSD) upgrade might offer more storage for your dollar than any previous SSD purchase. DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, forecasts that the average selling price of NAND flash memory chips will drop 10 percent sequentially in the third and fourth quarters of this year, despite Q3 traditionally being the peak season for consumer electronics. Growth in consumer electronic sales has been weaker than expected. Pile on top of that expanding an expanding supply of 3D NAND flash memory chips and you have the making of a near-perfect storm for lower prices. In theory, this should lead to cheaper SSDs. It could also lead to larger capacity drives in the marketplace. "The...
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Samsung is laying claim to having the highest capacity NVMe solid state drive on the market, an 8-terabyte model based on the ultra-thin Next-Generation Small Form Factor (NGSFF). As is often the case when it comes to technological firsts in storage, the new 8TB NVMe NF1 SSD is not a consumer drive, so don't expect to pick this thing up for your gaming PC, as cool as that might be. Instead, it's optimized for heavy data analytics and virtualization applications in next-gen data centers and enterprise environments. The new drive features 16 of Samsung's 512-gigabyte (GB) NAND flash memory packages. They're each stacked in 16 layers of 256-gigabit (Gb) 3-bit V-NAND chips, resulting in the world's...
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As modern datacenters grow, so too do their demands. The processor race is heating up with both ARM and AMD vying to unseat Intel from its throne. Banks of RAM are beginning to become augmented by Intel’s Optane memory and other products leveraging 3D XPoint technology. However, some of the most interesting changes in the industry are happening where all this data is eventually stored. Traditional hard drives have served the computing world well for more than half a century. In recent years, however, solid state storage has become increasingly attractive as it offers improvements over spinning media in virtually every regard. Solid state drives boast significantly faster read and write speeds...
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Toshiba has just announced that they will begin shipping samples of its 512 Gigabit, three-bits-per-cell, 64-layer 3D NAND (BiCS 3D). Mass production is expected to take place during the second half of 2017. Western Digital and Toshiba engineers have used digital stacking for their sixty-four layers in order to achieve a much larger storage density for its NAND in a smaller footprint. This technology also enables 1TB chip solutions. The flash memory stacked cell structure is best for applications that require high capacity and performance. According to Toshiba, “realizes a 65 percent larger capacity per unit chip size than the company’s 48-layer, 256Gb (32 gigabyte) device. This increases...
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Micron, the memory maker based out of Boise, Idaho, is introducing a new solid state drive family for enterprise clients that combines the typical fast performance SSDs are known for with atypical capacities culminating in 8 terabytes. The new Micron 5100 Series Enterprise SSDs are purportedly reliable too, delivering the storage trifecta that could have persuaded clients to kick their datacenter's hard disk drives to the curb. Source: Micron That is precisely the angle Micron is taking here. Looking at the total cost of ownership (TCO), Micron compared its 5100 Eco drives with 10,000 RPM hard drives to give an example of the kind of savings clients can achieve. In a typical 10K HDD deployment...
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Samsung continues to advanced the company's very successful 900 series family of consumer class SSDs today, with the announcement of the Samsung 960 EVO and 960 Pro NVMe PCI Express M.2 Solid State Drives. Built on Samsung's 3D V-NAND technology and employing the new Samsung Polaris SSD controller, the 960 Pro is Samsung's highest performance, high endurance drive and the successor to last year's 950 Pro. The 960 EVO is the lower cost model and a follow-on to last year's Samsung 950 EVO drive. The 960 EVO is also powered by the same Samsung Polaris controller but employs more cost-efficient Samsung TLC NAND memory. Both drives arrive in standard M.2 gumstick form factors with PCI Express Gen...
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Everyone who builds a PC from the ground up faces several decisions along the way, one of which relates to storage—do you go with a fast solid state drive, or stretch your dollar-per-gigabyte with a capacious hard drive? In the end, most of us settle on a modestly sized SSD for the OS and a beefy HDD for storage chores, but what if you could have the best of both worlds? The industry is heading in that direction.Intel and Micron have been tag-teaming various storage and memory technologies, like 3D XPoint (pronounced "cross point") memory, and word on the web is that the fruits of that partnership is a 10-terebyte SSD that's right around the corner—yes folks, 10 freaking terabytes. Talk about...
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Prices for solid state drives have fallen precipitously over the past year. This is especially true when shopping 2.5-inch form factor SATA SSDs, which is where some of the best values in solid state storage are currently found. That's certainly true of Micron's Crucial brand MX200 line, two of which we have in for review here. First announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas earlier this year, the MX200 series debuted in three capacities -- 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB, each priced at under 50 cents per gigabyte. Crucial set the MSRPs at $140 for the 250GB model, $250 for the 500GB SKU, and $470 for the 1TB drive, all three of which are available for considerably less online. At...
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Sometimes it's the enterprise sector that gets dibs on the coolest technology, and so it goes with a trio of TCO-optimized, high-performance solid state drives from Samsung, all three of which are based on three-dimensional (3D) Vertical NAND (V-NAND) flash memory technology. And get this -- the fastest of bunch can read data at up to 5,500 megabytes per second. That's the rated sequential read speed of Samsung's PM1725, a half-height, half-length (HHHL) card-type NVMe SSD. Other rated specs include a random read speed of up to 1,000,000 IOPS, random write performance of up to 120,000 IOPS, and sequential writes topping out at 1,800MB/s. On paper, this new PCIe SSD lays to waste even Intel's...
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If you're building a new system with all the fancy newfangled technology that's available, then there's a good chance you'll be rocking a USB Type-C connector. And if that's the case, SanDisk has a portable storage solution that may be of interest -- the Extreme 900 Portable SSD, a pocket-sized drive with a generous 1.92TB of storage capacity.SanDisk claims the Extreme 900 is the world's highest-performing, next-generation portable SSD. We prefer hard numbers to blanket claims, and on that front, SanDisk rates the Extreme 900 as being able to transfer data at up to 850MB/s. That kind of performance will come in handy when dealing with large files, such as those that accompany 4K video and high-resolution...
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Solid State Drives continue to be one of the more sought after (and effective) upgrades for both desktop and mobile systems. But as drives have matured, and newer generations have been released, the bandwidth limitations of the legacy SATA interface have become increasingly more apparent. Even relatively affordable, mainstream solid state drives are bumping into the SATA bandwidth limit right alongside more expensive flagship drives, which makes it difficult to differentiate between them based on performance alone.The answer to eliminating the bandwidth limitations of the SATA interface is PCI Express. The latest high-end solid state drives connect to a system using the PCI Express interface,...
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Toshiba and SanDisk announced the joint development of what they claim is the world's first 48-layer three dimensional stacked cell structure flash memory, otherwise known as BiCS (Bit Cost Scalable), a 2-bit-per-cell 128-gigabit (16 gigabytes) device. Put another way, BiCS is essentially Toshiba's version of the 3D NAND flash memory that's shipping with newer Samsung solid state drives (SSDs). The appeal of a 3D stacked cell structure is that it negates the need to continually shrink the size of NAND flash memory cells by using thinner process technologies and the technological hurdles that go along with it. Instead, stacking the cells allows for greater density and reduces costs, all while...
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At this point, we've pretty much seen what the best and fastest SATA 6Gbps-based solid state drives can offer -- transfer rates just shy of 600Mb/s. So what's the solution for even faster performance? To tap into the PCIe bus, of course! Enter Kingston's blazing fast HyperX Predator, an M.2 form factor SSD featuring a PCIe Gen 2.0 x4 interface. This 'Marvell-ous' piece of hardware sports a Marvell 88SS9293 controller and is capable of hitting read and write speeds of up to 1,400MB/s and 1,000MB/s, respectively. Yeah, it's like that. These are best case scenarios, of course, and those metrics apply to the 480GB capacity drive. There's also a 240GB model that can hit the same read speed and up...
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We tend to get pretty excited about new solid state drive (SSD) announcements. Why? Well, the more SSDs that flood the market, the better the chances that prices will continue to push downwards. See where we're coming from? With that in mind, Crucial took advantage of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas to out its new MX200 and BX100 SSD lines. Starting with the former, the MX200 is built for performance on a SATA 6Gbps interface, and as such, these drives boast sequential reads and writes of up to 555MB/s and 500MB/s, respectively, as well as random reads of up to 100,000 IOPS and random writes of up to 87,000 IOPS -- not too shabby! Just as important is endurance, and according...
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External hard drives are pretty commonplace these days and are great for backing up large amounts of data, but now that prices of solid state drives have come down from the stratosphere, is there a market for external SSDs? That's a question Samsung intends to answer with its new Portable SSD T1, a rather stylish looking external SSD for faster backup chores on the go.Granted, the price per gigabyte ratio still favors mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs), though just as users are willing to pay a premium for superior performance on the desktop, Samsung is banking on that same philosophy applying to mobile storage.The Portable SSD T1 line is available in 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB capacities, or at least...
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Now that Christmas is behind us, the first thing to do as we head into 2015 is relax for a moment -- you survived the hustle and bustle of what will likely rank as the busiest holiday shopping season ever. Once you've taken a deep breath and composed yourself, go ahead and assess your gifts. Tie? Check. Socks? Check. Number One Dad/Mom/Grandpa/Whatever mug? Check. Upgrades for your computer? Hmm, we're guessing the kids didn't stick their noses inside your rig to see what PC parts you could use, which is just as well -- this sort of thing is best handled by ourselves. And if we guessed right, here's a heads up that the Samsung 850 EVO solid state drive line is available on Amazon at around 50...
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