Items tagged with Storage
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 customizable PCIe 5.0 SSD solutions for enterprise and client products alike. The main attraction of the PCIe 5.0 standard is that it once again doubles the bandwidth compared to the previous generation (PCIe 4.0). It takes some time for device makers to really leverage the fatter lanes, and as it stands, the PCIe bus is not really a bottleneck for graphics, even with high-end gaming thrown...
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Intel has been making noise in virtually all segments of the storage market as of late. A few weeks back, we took a look at the Optane Memory H20, which combines 3DXpoint media with traditional NAND on hybrid M.2 device to accelerate the storage subsystem in mainstream notebooks and PCs. More recently, we evaluated the blazing-fast, ultra-pricey Optane SSD P5800X for high-performance workstations, and we can't forget about the budget friendly SSD 670p that arrived in early March. Today, we’ll shift our focus to the enterprise space and inspect Intel’s recently-announced PCIe Gen 4 SSD D7-P5510 series, which targets data center applications with high-capacities, and enhanced throughput...
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Just last week, many Western Digital MyBook Live owners lamented the fact that their personal cloud was being attacked and wiped remotely. Those storage devices were older and hadn't been supported since 2015. As a result, those NAS products proved to be a lesson in not putting unsecured and unpatched devices on your network. Much more alarming appears to be another zero-day, unpatched bug, this time in the WD's current lineup, and any supported device that hasn't already been updated is vulnerable. Before we go any farther, it's worth noting that WD has solved the issue with MyCloud OS 5. Owners of MyCloud devices should ensure immediately that their drives are fully updated to the latest,...
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When we reviewed the Intel Optane SSD 905P back in 2018, despite a significant price premium over NAND-based SSDs, we gave the drive and Editor’s Choice award due to its exceptional performance where it mattered most for consumers, e.g. access times and random transfers at low queue depths. Intel Optane solid state drives typically offer much better latency characteristics, more consistent and predicable performance with a variety of workloads -- regardless of how much drive capacity is being used – and their endurance ratings are off the charts. The only caveats with the 905P were pricing, and sequential performance that wasn’t quite as high as the top-end NAND-based SSDs of...
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Spinning platters have served the storage scene well over the years, and even as faster (and pricier) solid state drives with no moving parts have gained considerable traction, the good old fashioned mechanical HDD is still a popular option for bulk storage chores. The price per gigabyte just can't be beat. That will probably be true for a long while to come, especially if new research into a graphene coating bears fruit. Researchers at the University of Cambridge claim it could enable ultra-high density HDDs that are 10 times more capacious than today's models. Such a massive increase would be an incredible development for a storage medium that first appeared around 70 years ago, in the 1950s....
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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 period. That's because when it comes to SSD warranties, most manufacturers (including PNY) typically guarantee a drive for a set period of time or when a certain write threshold has been reached (labeled as terabytes written, or TBW), whichever occurs first. For most people, it is the former. But for people who mine Chia, which taps into unused storage space, the latter happens much...
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If you spot a good deal on a solid state drive and are on the fence about it, you might want to pounce. That's because SSD prices could be about to rise. Probably nothing astronomical, though on the higher side of a recent estimate, client SSDs (which are those purchased by home consumers, as opposed to data center drives) could see a pricing uptick of 8 percent. We are not hitting the panic button—it's hard to complain about SSD prices in general, given how far down they have come over the past year and earlier. Heck, we even saw Intel slash its SSD 670p pricing just two days after launching last week, to put is PCIe 3.0 offering more in line with the competition (you can grab the 1TB...
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Although the company just recently fleshed out its flagship line of PCIe Gen 4 NVMe solid state drives with the 2TB SSD 980 Pro, Samsung is already back at it, with yet another family of drives that target a different market segment. While the Samsung SSD 980 Pro is intended for workstations types, performance enthusiasts and gamers that crave nothing but the best, the new Samsung SSD 980 drives – sans “Pro” – we’ll be showing you here today, target more mainstream computing applications. The branding of the new Samsung SSD 980s may be reminiscent of their higher-end counterparts, but rest assured the two series of drives are quite different. Samsung SSD 980s have...
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Intel is releasing a new family of solid state drives today, targeting mainstream users and everyday computing tasks. The new Intel SSD 670p series leverages the company’s latest 144-layer QLC 3D NAND flash memory technology, with an improved dynamic SLC caching algo and updated PCIe Gen 3 controller. Unlike some of the more recent ultra-high-end PCIe Gen 4 SSDs to be released recently, complete with insanely high sequential transfer speeds north of 7GB/s, the Intel SSD 670p eschews the blazing sequentials in favor of optimized performance for random transfers at low queue depths that are more common in every day computing task and contribute to better overall system responsiveness. That’s...
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In September of last year, the initial salvo of Samsung SSD 980 Pro drives was launched. At the time, Samsung SSD 980 Pro PCIe 4 NVMe drives in capacities of 250GB on up to 1TB were made available, but a 2TB drive had been announced and was on the roadmap as well. It took a bit of time for Samsung to make the 2TB drive a reality, but nevertheless it is here now, and we’ve got one on hand for some benchmarking and evaluation. Except for its obviously higher capacity, the 2TB Samsung SSD 980 Pro doesn’t differ from the smaller drives that were previously made available. Due to how the drives function, however, the higher capacity does alter the performance profile a bit. We’ll...
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ADATA has been consistently expanding its line-up of XPG, or Xtreme Performance Gaming branded hardware, targeting PC enthusiasts and gamers. The XPG family now consists of everything from micoSDXC cards all the way on up to full gaming systems and notebooks. XPG's SSDs (Solid State Drives), however, are arguably the most extensive array of products in the company's portfolio. ADATA has a myriad of XPG SSDs available, at a wide variety of price points and performance levels. The two drives we’ll be showing you here today, the new ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70 and XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite, are both bleeding-edge PCI Express 4.0 NVMe drives, packing some of Micron’s latest TLC NAND. The ADATA...
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Samsung is expanding their line-up of SATA-based solid state drives, with a new series of products designed to balance performance and capacity. A few months back, the company launched the SSD 870 QVO series of drives, based on QLC, or quad-level cell, V-NAND. These new Samsung drives launching today – the Samsung SSD 870 EVO series – are similar in many regards, but EVO SSDs feature Samsung’s latest TLC (triple level cell) V-NAND, with the commensurate firmware to match. These new TLC-based drives also offer slightly higher performance than their QLC-based predecessors, with longer warranties and better endurance ratings as well. Take a look at the Samsung SSD 870 EVO series’...
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As games continue to grow in size, so too do the storage devices required to store copies of Call of Duty, GTA V, and others. Accordingly, Western Digital has announced a size increase for its consumer brand portable SSDs at CES 2021. These new 4TB drives will become available this quarter. but will cost consumers a pretty penny if they want one. SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD The SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD is NVMe powered storage and is one of the fastest in the bunch at 2000MB/s read and write. It features a “forged aluminum chassis” to act as a heatsink for the drive and a USB 3.1 Type C connection for blazing-fast speeds. The models which are available now come with a 5-year warranty...
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Spinning hard disks are completely out for just about all but the very cheapest of systems. Solid state drives like the WD Blue SN550 we'll be evaluating in this article are here to stay, and continue to make their way into lower-priced, ever more affordable notebooks and desktops. That's no doubt due to the fact that these drives' asking prices have consistently dropped year over year. In 2020, there hasn't been much good news on the affordable, widely-available PC hardware front, but SSD availability has been one bright spot. There's never been a better time to grab an SSD to speed up any PC still chugging along with magnetic media. Western Digital isn't a newcomer to solid state storage,...
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Predicting what will happen in the PC market, including supplementary components, sometimes feels a lot like throwing darts at a dartboard. Analysts do the best they can with the information available, but things have a tendency to turn on a dime. That said, one welcome trend we have seen is the continued drop in price for solid state drive (SSD) storage (without a shortage of drives), and there is reason to believe that further price cuts are around the corner. I am not sure storage makers see it as a welcome trend, but consumers sure do. This has made it easier than ever to consider an SSD in place of a mechanical hard disk drive (HDD)—even though the latter still offers a better price...
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The Steam Autumn sale kicked off yesterday, and you may be buying a few more games that you want to try out. The biggest problem you could encounter is not knowing what games to uninstall so you have room to install others. However, Western Digital has you covered this Black Friday with some stellar deals on storage, so you can install and play the games you want, without having to sacrifice those that you already have, in order to free up storage space. Western Digital 1TB WD_Black SN750 NVMe Internal Gaming SSD Today, the top deal we have for you is this WD_Black 1TB M.2 SSD coming in at a whopping 54% off, bringing the price down to $115. If you need to store some games, this is...
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At the beginning of September, Sabrent announced its Rocket 4 Plus solid state drive, which is rated to deliver delightfully fast sequential read speeds of up to 7,000MB/s and write speeds up to 6,850MB/s. This is large part due to Phison's next-gen PS5018-E18 controller. As enticing as that is, it appears the E18 can push even further. The controller chip is basically what drives an SSD, managing the data flow from the NAND flash memory chips and I/O. Phison has been pressing the pedal to the metal, with its E18 controller rated to deliver read and write speeds of up to 7,000MB/s, and long with 4K random read and writes of up to 1 million IOPS. Here's a breakdown... Those are some impressive...
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Earlier this year, Samsung unveiled the privacy-minded Portable SSD T7 Touch. This external USB-C storage device delivered high capacities up to 2TB and impressive read-write speeds over USB 3.2 Gen 2. Its headlining feature, however, was an integrated fingerprint reader to effortlessly unlock the drive’s AES 256-bit encryption. Not everyone needs this one-touch access to their files though, and would prefer a more straightforward external storage solution. For these users Samsung has released a non-touch variant of the T7 to shed some cost, but keep the rest of the goodness intact. Samsung Portable SSD T7 Specifications & Features The simply named Samsung Portable SSD T7 lacks the...
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We first caught a glimpse of the Samsung SSD 980 Pro all the way back at CES in early January. The highly-anticipated drive was tucked away in a display case in Samsung’s massive booth on the show floor, but other than the branding, some early claimed performance data, and the fact that drive had a native PCIe 4.0 interface, details were scant. All that changes today, though. We’ve gotten our hands on a couple of shiny, new Samsung SSD 980 Pro drives – in 250GB and 1TB flavors – and are finally able to give you the full scoop. The Samsung SSD 980 Pro series of solid state drives not only support the PCI Express 4.0 interface, but they are outfitted with a completely new...
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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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Although much of the excitement in the solid state storage market revolves around the latest, bleeding-edge NVMe-based drives, there is still a massive need for SATA-based solutions. Not only are there a myriad of legacy systems ripe for upgrades that rely on SATA, but owners of current-gen systems often want more affordable, higher-capacity -- but still fast -- solid state storage to pair with their NVMe boot drives. Samsung has traditionally been a leader in the space, with a succession of popular drives over the years. The newest members of the family, the Samsung SSD 870 QVO we’ll be showing you here today, builds upon Samsung’s success with higher capacities, strong performance...
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