Items tagged with Storage
Only somewhat recently has pricing on solid state drives (SSDs) become attractive to the point where buying a mechanical hard disk drive (HDD) only makes sense for backup duties and other secondary storage configurations (like in a NAS box or for a surveillance system). However, SSD pricing could see a steep rise this year, due to rising costs of NAND flash memory chips. The timing is unfortunate because even NVMe SSDs with faster speeds than SATA-based SSDs have dipped in price. Here are some examples... Crucial MX500 1TB NVMe SSD: $107.99, Amazon Kingston 500GB NVMe SSD: $59.99, Amazon Silicon Power 256GB NVMe SSD: $36.99, Amazon Sabrent Rocket Q 2TB NVMe SSD: $219.99, Newegg Pricing in the...
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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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Patriot has rolled out a new SSD that is aimed squarely at gamers and enthusiasts looking for the ultimate in performance from their SSD. The drive is called the Viper VP4100 M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4 x4 SSD and promises sequential read speeds up to 5GB/s and write speeds up to 4.4 GB/s. The SSD is also rated for up to 800k random read and write IOPS, and is optimized for multi-threaded and data-intensive applications with 4K Aligned Random Read and Write tech. The only folks that will be able to take full advantage of this PCIe 4.0 SSD are those with AMD Ryzen 3000 desktop processors and X570-based motherboards. The VP4100 use a Phision PCIe 4.0 controller and has an external thermal sensor...
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Now that SSDs and their components have been substantially cost-reduced and essentially gone mainstream, there are more and more players in the space. What was once a market reserved for but a few top-tier semiconductor manufacturers, is now increasingly crowded by new, lesser-known third-party companies looking to capitalize on the increasing demand for super-fast storage. One such company is Asura Technology. Asura was founded less than a year ago, and has developed a high-end, NVMe SSD with a handful of interesting features, targeted specifically at gamers and performance enthusiasts -- the Asura Genesis Xtreme we will showing you here today. Asura Technology does not have their own proprietary...
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Toshiba on Tuesday announced it has developed a new XFMEXPRESS form factor for "removable PCIe attached, NVMe memory devices," otherwise known as SSDs. These are not like any traditional SSDs, however, but smaller and lower-height ones to enable fast storage in increasingly thinner and lighter devices, including ultrabooks and things like VR headsets. "With a new form factor and an innovative connector, XFMEXPRESS technology delivers an unparalleled combination of features designed to revolutionize ultra-mobile PCs, IoT devices and various embedded applications. Recognizing the need for a new class of removable storage, Toshiba Memory leveraged its extensive background in single-package memory...
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Kingston has been a dedicated stalwart of the memory, storage, and peripheral markets for many years. The company’s products target virtually every type of user, from entry-level first-time PC builders to seasoned sysadmins. The products we’ll be showing you here today, the Kingston DC500R and DC500M solid state drives, target the latter type of user, in need of reliable, high-capacity SSD storage for enterprise and data center applications. At first glance – of both their physical design and specifications -- the Kingston DC500R and DC500M drives appear to be similar. The ‘R’ variant, however, is geared for read-heavy workloads, while the ‘M’ variant...
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A few months back, Samsung launched its SSD 970 EVO Plus series of solid state drives, which featured the company’s latest TLC NAND flash memory and an updated firmware optimized for higher performance. When the line-up initially arrived, capacities up to 2TB were announced, but only the 250GB – 1TB models were made available. The highest-capacity, 2TB Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus has just arrived, however, and we got the chance to take one for a spin. At its core, the 2TB Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus is virtually identical to the other drives in the line-up, save for a larger DRAM cache and, obviously, more NAND storage capacity. Here’s how the full line-up compares to the original...
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A few weeks back, we took a look at the WD Blue SN500 SSD. That solid state drive is an affordable NVMe M.2 option, that’s targeted at mainstream systems and budget-constrained users. The WD Blue SN500 offers the benefits of NVMe, with pricing that is in-line with legacy SATA devices. The drive we’ll be looking at today, however, the WD Black SN750 SSD with Heatsink, takes things in a completely different direction. The WD Black SN750 SSD with Heatsink targets enthusiasts and gamers, and offers much higher performance in some scenarios. It is also priced higher, but not exorbitantly so. The WD Black SN750 SSD with Heatsink is by no means a mainstream drive, as you’ll see shortly,...
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Like many hardware companies, Intel is using Computex to showcase a bunch of new products and technologies, such as its Core i9-9900KS Special Edition processor, 10-nanometer Ice Lake CPUs, and Project Athena laptops. In addition, Intel has unveiled a new and faster Optane Memory product that improves upon the performance of the previous generation offerings. The new Optane Memory M15 drives consist of Intel's 3D XPoint memory plopped onto an M.2 form factor module, with a PCI Express 3.0 x4 interface. As with the previous generation Optane Memory 10 modules, the M15 is using 128-gigabit (Gb) 3D XPoint built on a 20 nanometer manufacturing process. The major change, however, is the bump from...
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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 announces a new NVMe SSD line, and the first thing we look at is the price. Case in point, Kingston today introduced a new KC2000 family of NVMe SSDs starting at around $62. We'll circle back to pricing in a moment, but first let's talk a bit about the new drive series. Kingston's latest SSD family pairs 96-layer 3D TLC (triple-level cell) NAND flash memory built by Toshiba and SanDisk...
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The PC gaming and enthusiast realm is RGB-ing all the things it seems. Thermaltake launched a desk with RGB lighting earlier this month, Corsair has its Ironclaw RGB mouse, while Gigabyte launched an RGB NVMe SSD and Razer is developing a toaster with RGB lighting. Enthusiasts wanting another RGB SSD option have a new product from KLEVV to check out. The SSD is the CRAS C700 RGB SSD; and it's an M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 3x4 SSD. The storage device supports ASUS AURA Sync, is RGB Fusion ready, and supports both MSI Mystic Light Sync and ASRock Polychrome Sync. That support will allow you to sync the SSD with the lighting on your other products if they are all compatible. KLEVV features...
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For the first time ever, you can buy a 1TB capacity microSD card, courtesy of SanDisk (which has beaten Micron to the retail punch). That is provided you have the requisite cash—the asking price is $449.99, and it does not appear that street pricing is any lower than the MSRP at the moment. That may change, though don't expect this amount of microSD storage to be cheap in the near future. For those who can afford it, this is a massive amount of storage for supported devices. That is something you will want to double check before plunking down several hundred dollars, as some devices have a cap on how much storage they support. High resolution cameras and camcorders are obvious destinations...
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Enterprise-class solid state drives used to be rare beasts that commanded heavy price premiums over their more common, consumer-oriented counterparts. As leading SSD and flash memory manufacturers have evolved their processes and technologies, however, availability and pricing for many enterprise-class solid state storage solutions have dropped dramatically. Whereas enterprise SSDs that target mission-critical workstations or data centers used to cost many times that of a consumer SSD, that is no longer the case for some products. Samsung's 883 and 983 DCT drives we’ll be showing you here, for example, are available in relatively large capacities and surprisingly won’t break...
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