PCI-SIG (Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group), the standards body responsible for overseeing the development of the PCI Express specification, announced that PCIe 7.0 is on track to bring another huge jump in bandwidth by 2025. As such, we could see solid state drives (SSDs) scale to around 64GB/s...Read more...
For a time, my main PC rocked a pair of 480GB Intel SSD 730 series drives in RAID 0 and I thought that was the bee's knees. It seemed like storage nirvana back in the day. My, how times have changed in the past eight years. Fast forward to today and I find myself drooling over the prospect of running a pair of...Read more...
If you're familiar with M.2 SSDs, then you know that the standard sizes are named "M.2-2280", "M.2-2230", and so on. The last half of the number refers to the length of a drive's PCB, so an "M.2-2280" SSD is 80 millimeters long. M.2 SSDs officially can be up to 110mm in length, or as short as 30mm.
The first half...Read more...
Anyone who says storage is getting too darn fast is a blasphemer. Sure, not everyone can fully utilize the transfer speeds that today's top solid state drives (SSDs) deliver, but some can and more will as time goes on. Drive makers seem to agree because they're already looking ahead to next-gen models, two of which...Read more...
This year's Dell Technologies World event is right around the corner and one of the conference's Diamond sponsors, Kioxia, will be in attendance to showcase a handful of "breakthrough flash storage solutions." Among them will be one of the first public demonstrations of a drive based on the EDSFF E3 form factor for...Read more...
Kioxia is expanding its ever-growing storage portfolio with the introduction of the XG8 solid state drive (SSD) series, a lineup of high performance drives intended for multiple segments. Technically the XG8 series falls within the high-end client category for systems like performance laptops, desktops, and gaming...Read more...
So, you think your solid state drive (SSD) is fast? It might very well be. Heck, just about any modern SSD is zippy, especially when compared to a mechanical hard disk drive (HDD) with spinning platters. But whatever drive you're rocking in your PC, it's not as fast as Adata's upcoming "Project Nighthawk" and "Project...Read more...
Santa may not have a graphics card in his sack of toys to deliver this year, but he might leave a video game or three under the tree. And as such, you might find yourself in the market for a storage upgrade. Games take up space, after all, and even game updates are getting bigger. Whatever the reason, if you need more...Read more...
Game installs are not exactly shrinking, and even game updates can sometimes require an enormous amount of storage space. There's good news, though—Black Friday is here and it brought with it some delightful discounts on solid state drives. We're talking about savings of up to 60% off the MSRP, with some drives...Read more...
It's been a little while since Kioxia last introduced a client solid state drive line, that being the BG4 series we reviewed in 2019. Now a bit over two years later Kioxia is following that up with its new BG5 series, which aims to "bring a suitable balance of performance, cost, and power to everyday gamers and PC...Read more...
Kioxia announced a couple of treats for data center clients in need of expansive storage options. The first is the introduction of the first production-ready 9.5mm XD6 Series Enterprise and Data Center Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) E1.S solid state drives, and the second is the unveiling of its CD7 Series drives...Read more...
Need more high-speed storage space for your growing games catalog and other programs? Or maybe you're plotting a new build from the ground up around either Intel's Alder Lake (soon) or AMD's Zen 3+ (early next year, likely) processors. Whatever your reason for wanting more storage, there are some attractive SSD...Read more...
Some older PC users may have noticed a hit to their computer's performance recently. The cause may not be because they upgraded to Windows 11 (if you are fortunate enough for your PC to meet the requirements), but on legacy Windows 10 installations and due to older solid state drives in combination with a recent...Read more...
Intel is about to bring PCI Express 5.0 into consumer homes with the launch of Alder Lake and its accompanying Z690 chipset, but what about actual products that can tap into the extra bandwidth the upcoming platform provides? Phison is on it. The controller maker sent us a note today announcing it is working on...Read more...
Though cryptocurrency has drawn some ire worldwide, there is some serious market potential, and it would be foolish for tech companies to ignore potential financial gains. Take, for example, a cryptocurrency called Chia, which utilizes unused storage as part of a proof of space and time blockchain. The faster, the...Read more...
Samsung finds itself in a braggadocios mood over the continued development of its vertical NAND flash memory chips, and in a blog post spanning nearly 1,400 words, the company talked about what makes it so special, and where it is headed. To that latter point, its 7th generation V-NAND flash memory chips are punching...Read more...
Is cryptocurrency mining the reason why we can't have nice things? You could make that argument in some instances, even with solid state drives (SSDs). Case in point, PNY has significantly reduced the endurance rating on its high-performance XLR8 CS3030 SSD family, and by extension, potentially slashed the warranty...Read more...
It may seem hard to believe, but storage makers are already approaching the limits of the PCI Express 4.0 bus in a typical NVMe drive, with the latest controller designs pushing transfer speeds in the neighborhood of 7 gigabytes per second (GB/s). That being the case, Silicon Motion is already at work developing...Read more...
Amid all of the hoopla surrounding AMD's next-generation Ryzen processors based on its Zen 2 CPU architecture is an interesting technology that complements the launch. We are talking about PCI Express 4.0. This is part of AMD's accompanying X570 chipset for Ryzen, and it doubles the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0. One of the...Read more...
While some companies have begun trotting out PCIe 4.0 NVMe solid state drives, Toshiba on Wednesday announced an updated version of its XG6 series from last year. The new XG6-P still shuttles data through the PCIe 3.0 bus, but ups the ante over the previous generation drives with faster sequential and random read and...Read more...
An interesting thing is happening in the solid state drive (SSD) industry. We are in the midst of a transition from SATA to speedier NVMe SSDs, the latter of which are more costly. At the same time, NAND flash memory prices continues to fall, pushing down the costs of SSDs. So, it's interesting whenever a company...Read more...
Solid State Drive (SSD) prices are falling, which is good news for consumers. As seen in our review of WD Blue SN500, prices for NVMe PCIe SSDs are coming down to the 13 cents/GB range with superior performance than what's available with garden variety SATA SSDs.
Even more promising is the fact that 512GB and 1TB SSDs are expected to dip Read more...