Items tagged with SSD
Intel has been pushing its Optane memory solutions as speedy supplements to traditional storage, be it a mechanical hard drive or a solid state drive—on supported systems, an Optane memory stick can supercharge the primary storage scheme. That's still a use case scenario, though looking ahead, Intel announced another Optane product, the Optane Memory H10 with solid state storage. The new Optane Memory H10 is a storage drive in the M.2 form factor. It combines Intel's Optane memory with quad-level cell (QLC) 3D NAND flash memory into a single product. The concept is essentially the same as adding an Optane memory stick to a system to boost storage performance, except the H10 is basically...
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The solid state storage market is highly competitive, and it is also one that changes rapidly as the technology continues to evolve and prices fluctuate due to various factors. There are dozens of companies with multiple product lines that vie for dominance in the SSD space, which can make selecting a drive for a system a rather daunting task for the uninitiated. In this piece, we'll endeavor to make the task of buying an SSD a little easier for everyone by shining the spotlight on what we consider to be some of the better SSD deals currently available in a wide range of prices and capacities. Before we dig into the list, however, let's take a brief moment to review a few fundamentals for the...
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Patriot is perhaps one of the lesser-known PC component and accessory manufacturers in comparison to large players like Kingston or Corsair, but the Northern California-based company has actually been around since 1985. About 10 years ago, Patriot launched its Viper Gaming brand, which offers high-performance gaming memory and peripherals. The product we have today, the Patriot EVLVR, is from Patriot's more business-facing product lines and it is an external, portable NVMe SSD which employs the Thunderbolt 3 interface for full PCIe Gen 3 performance capabilities. The Patriot EVLVR Portable NVMe TB3 SSD The Patriot EVLVR we have in hand is a 1TB model that retails for about $429.99 at Amazon,...
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Samsung has announced a new SSD family for those that aren't quite ready to hop on over to the NVMe PCIe bandwagon, or have an older desktop or notebook that only accepts SATA storage. Meet the 860 QVO family, which is available in capacities up to 4TB. According to Samsung, the 860 QVO family makes use of 4-bit multi-level cell (QLC) NAND flash (the first for a consumer SATA product), a Samsung MJX SSD controller, and is available in a standard 2.5-inch form-factor. Up to SATA-III speeds are supported, with sequential reads and writes topping out at 550MB/sec and 520MB/sec respectively. Random read and write speeds are pegged at 97K and 89K IOPS respectively. To further improve performance,...
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Two of Apple's most popular products over the past year could be subject to some rather nasty malfunctions according to the company. Apple has initiated replacement programs for both the 13-inch MacBook Pro (without Touch Bar) and the iPhone X, which was recently discontinued. In the case of the 13-inch MacBook Pro, Apple warns that a "limited number" of systems with 128GB or 256GB SSDs could experience data loss and complete failure of the drive. Needless to say, this is a serious issue, especially if customers don't have a recently completed Time Machine backup. The company says that MacBook Pro models affected by this issue were sold between June 2017 and June 2018. Apple has a support...
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Micron on Wednesday made a couple of announcements aimed at advancing the mobile memory and enterprise storage markets. Starting with the former, Micron said it has begun mass producing the industry's highest capacity monolithic memory for mobile devices and applications, and specifically 12-gigabit (Gb) low-power double data rate 4x (LPDDR4x) DRAM. The LPDDR4x DRAM is being produced on a 10-nanometer class process technology. Micron claims the new memory is capable of reducing power by up to 10 percent at similar data rates of 4,266 megabits per second (Mbps) compared to previous generation memory. Realistically that's not going to have a big impact on a smartphone's battery life, but every...
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Researchers from Radboud University in the Netherlands have announced a flaw that affects some SSDs that feature hardware-based security; the flaw could allow an attacker to completely bypass disk encryption. Bypassing the encryption would give the hackers full access to the local data without having to know the password for the disk. The researchers are clear that the flaw only affects certain SSD models that have hardware-based encryption. SSDs with hardware-based encryption have specific chips inside that handle the task of encrypting and decrypting data. The vulnerabilities that researchers Carlo Meijer and Bernard van Gastel found are in the firmware of the SSDs. The duo says that the...
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If you're looking for a serious upgrade to your storage subsystem, Corsair is hoping that you give its new Force Series MP510 SSD family a closer look. The MP510 family is the successor to the MP500 and is available in an M.2 2280 PCIe NVMe form-factor in sizes ranging from as little as 240GB to as much as 1.92TB. According to Corsair, the MP510 SSDs will be equally at home in your gaming desktop or your gaming notebook. The gum stick SSDs promises read speeds of up to 3,480MB/sec, and read speeds of 3,000MB/sec. This puts them on about even footing with Samsung's 970 Evo family of SSDs (rated at 3,500MB/sec reads and 2,500MB/sec writes). While the stated read speeds for the...
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Samsung has become somewhat of a household name in the consumer solid state drive market—between its Pro and Evo drives, the company offers some of the fastest and best bang-for-buck options out there. Its newest SSDs, however, are aimed at data center customers and consist of several new models aimed at reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO). The new Data Center SSD solutions consist of the 860 DCT, 883 DCT, 983 DCT, and 983 ZET, each one "engineered to meet the evolving needs of small and medium businesses (SMBs)," which essentially entails faster sustained performance, higher capacities, and of course enterprise-grade reliability and security. "Samsung’s Data Center SSD portfolio...
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Toshiba has released a string of top-notch, affordable NVMe solid state drives over the last couple of years featuring its BiCS flash memory technology, which target a wide array of market segments. We’ve shown you a few recently, like the diminutive, affordable OCZ RC100 and the mainstream OEM targeted, XG5. Today, Toshiba is redoubling its efforts in the OEM segment with yet another new client NVMe drive, the XG6. We first posted news of the XG6 a few weeks back – if you’d like to check out the initial announcement, it is available right here. Like the XG5, this new drive is optimized for consumer desktop and mobile computing applications and it features Toshiba’s...
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Samsung has been a leader in the solid state storage market for a number of years. Whether you were looking for affordable SATA-based offerings or high-performance NVMe gumsticks, Samsung usually has an answer. And we’re not just talking about internal drives either; Samsung has also released a number of excellent external storage devices, like the T3 and last year’s T5, for example. What Samsung hasn’t had was an ultra-high speed external solid state device that shed the limitations of legacy interfaces – until today, that is. Samsung’s latest storage product, the X5 Thunderbolt Portable SSD, is a durable, attractive, external device packing an NVMe solid state...
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Anyone who has been paying attention will have noticed that solid state drive prices have come down over the few months, and the year as a whole. It is now relatively affordable to buy a 512GB or even 1TB SSD, especially if you catch one on sale. Well, things may be getting even better for consumers. There is an oversupply of NAND flash memory that is expected pushes SSD prices down even further, this year and into 2019. How low are we talking about here? Jim Handy, an analyst with Objective Analysis, said he expects the market for NAND flash memory to correct itself, or even bottom out altogether, to actual cost of production of 64-layer 3D NAND flash, The Register reports. That would put the...
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Intel has taken another step forward in its perpetual march towards high-capacity, lower-cost solid state drives. Today’s release of the new Intel SSD 660p series of drives marks the first in the company’s line-up to pack its brand-new 64-layer QLC (quad-level cell) 3D NAND Flash memory, which essentially doubles the capacities available within the same footprint of previous-gen technologies. The Intel SSD 660p series also leverages NVMe technology, the M.2 form factor, and it employs firmware that’s tuned specifically for mainstream, consumer class workloads. These drives are meant to finally put a nail in SATA’s coffin, thanks to their significantly better performance...
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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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The SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD we'll be showing you here today is the follow-up to the SanDisk Extreme 510 Portable SSD. This new drive fully embraces USB-C while retaining USB Type-A compatibility for older Macs and PCs. It promises speedy storage (up to 550 MB/s claimed), a wide range of capacities (250GB, 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB), and an IP55 rating against dust and water intrusion. The drive’s slim body looks more like a portable charger for your cell phone than the bulky external hard drives of old, and it fits in a shirt pocket easily. It feels rugged, with black soft-touch material covering its back, textured hard plastic on the front panel (also black), and an orange-accented...
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Samsung has announced that it has begun mass production of a new type of Flash storage chip. The company's fifth-gen V-NAND has the fastest data transfer speed in the industry and is the first to use the Toggle DDR 4.0 NAND interface. That new interface improves the speed for transmitting data of the 256Gb V-NAND to over 1.4 Gbps. That is a 40% gain in performance for this new Samsung 90-layer NAND technology, compared to Samsung's 64-layer predecessor. Samsung says that the new V-NAND (Vertically stacked NAND) has energy efficiency comparable to the old 64-layer chip because the operating voltage for the fifth-gen part has been reduced from the 1.8 volts required for that old...
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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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The latest generation of NVMe-based solid state drives have significantly altered the value proposition for performance-conscious PC enthusiasts. Whereas the NVMe drives of “old” were significantly more expensive than SATA-based products, while offering somewhat higher performance, many of today’s drives are only slightly higher priced and may offer 5 – 6x the peak throughput. Case in point, the ADATA XPG SX8200 we will be showing you here today. This ADATA drive is a speedy, yet affordable solid state drive that offers peak read and write speeds of 3200/1700MB per second, with a good warranty and solid endurance rating. The ADATA XPG SX8200’s main features and specifications...
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Although we first caught a glimpse of the SSD that would become the Toshiba OCZ RC100 back at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, they are now ready for public consumption and Toshiba has just begun shipping the drives. If you’re not hip to the OCZ RC100, it’s a new family of solid state drives that’s specifically designed to push the NVMe interface and smaller M.2 form factor further down into mainstream price points. Toshiba accomplishes this feat by using a single-package design that packs the NAND flash memory and controller into a single chip. The drive’s design is also DRAM-less to further reduce costs. The end result is a tiny, power-efficient product that...
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Over the past two weeks, we have detailed an ongoing issue that has prevented PCs with certain Intel SSDs from upgrading to the new Windows 10 April 2018 Update. Microsoft was vague about what SSDs were affected at first, but then later confirmed that the bug crippled the Intel SSD 600p and Intel SSD Pro 6000 series. "When attempting to upgrade to the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, select devices with Intel SSD 600p series or Intel SSD Pro 6000p series may crash and enter a UEFI screen after reboot," said Microsoft earlier this month. "Microsoft is working with OEM partners and Intel to identify and block devices with Intel SSD 600p series or Intel SSD Pro 6000p series...
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Intel and Micron have just jointly announced shipment of the first quad-level cell (QLC) NAND-based SSD in the industry: the Micron 5210 ION, which is aimed directly at read-intensive cloud workloads. Intel-Micron say that the new QLC NAND has 33 percent greater bit density than TLC NAND, which gives it the ability to address opportunities in the market that used to be serviced only by lower cost, higher density Hard Disk Drives (HDD). QLC technology allows the SSD to reach 1-terabit densities using a 64-layer 3D NAND structure. However, the Intel-Micron team also notes 96-layer QLC NAND is also en-route. Regardless, the first products are optimized to meet demands of high performance data...
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Western Digital recently launched a new family of NVMe-based solid state drives targeting gamers and enthusiasts. The simply-branded WD Black NVMe SSD family has a similar naming convention to some previous-generation solid state drives built by the company, but these latest offerings are packing some new technology and offer performance much higher than any of the earlier WD-made storage product offerings that came before it. The WD Black NVMe SSD family features a new controller, 64-layer BiCS3 3D TLC NAND flash memory, an intelligently laid-out PCB that optimizes thermal characteristics, and firmware tuned for enthusiast desktop applications. The drive’s main features and specifications...
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