Items tagged with Storage
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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WD’s Blue family of solid state drives has historically been comprised of nothing but SATA-based offerings, but the company recently updated the line-up with some brand-new NVMe-based drives. The WD Blue SN500 we’ll be showing you here today is the first Blue-branded NVMe SSD from the company, and as has been the case with many of WD’s “Blue” products, it is aggressively priced and pushes NVMe into more mainstream territory. The WD Blue SN500, however, does not target the high-end of the NVMe market; that is the WD Black family's job. As you’ll see in the WD Blue SN500’s specifications below, it’s much more tame than many of other NVMe solid state...
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Intel announced its Optane Memory H10 back during the Consumer Electronics Show, early this year. Just in case you missed the initial announcement, the company's Optane Memory H10 is a new class of products from Intel that combines 3D Xpoint memory technology and QLC (quad-level cell) 3D NAND flash on a single M.2 device. The goal for the product is to offer the benefits of 3D Xpoint and Optane Memory in conjunction with the affordability and speed of a QLC-based NVMe SSD in a single device. Initially, these hybrid drives will find their way into utlrabooks or small form factor systems that may not have the accommodations for multiple drives. 3D Xpoint and NAND flash memory can both be used for...
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You might think you have enough storage space for your tablet or smartphone, but that is rarely the case. An Android device with 128GB or even 256GB of integrated storage fills up quickly when you add a lot of games or take lots of high-resolution photos and 4K video. Gamers who like to play on the Nintendo Switch also need microSD cards for storage. Amazon has a deal going right now on a fast microSD card that may be just what the doctor ordered. Amazon is offering a SanDisk Ultra 200GB microSDXC card that is UHS-I rated and ships with an SD card adapter to fit into card readers. The memory card is UHS Speed Class U1 and Speed Class 10. The 200GB card is on sale for $25, which is $12.95 off...
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Like a handful of other recently-released solid state drives that feature QLC (quad-level cell) NAND flash memory, the Crucial P1 series is designed to be a relatively high-performing, but still affordable storage option, versus legacy SATA-based solutions. When it initially arrived, the Crucial P1’s MSRPs didn’t necessarily reflect this design goal, but now that availability has ramped and street prices have settled, the Crucial P1 could represent a significant upgrade for users still hobbling along with slower storage or planning a new, budget-friendly build, and it won't break the bank. We’ve got the Crucial P1’s main features and specifications outlined in the table...
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When we evaluated the original ADATA XPG SX8200 SSD last year, we found the drive to be a solid value that offered good performance for the money. So, when ADATA mentioned that it had an updated version of the XPG SX8200 available for review that should perform even better, we were eager to check it out. The aptly named ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro is similar to the original drive in many ways, but incorporates a new controller and firmware that cranks performance up a few notches and adds some new features. The ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro’s main features and specifications are outlined in the table below. As you can see, sequential transfers are rated for a healthy 3.5GB/s (reads) and 3GB/s (writes)...
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Samsung on Wednesday announced it has begun mass producing the industry's first 1-terabyte capacity embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS) 2.1 for use in next-generation mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Could this be a hint of what to expect from Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S10 smartphone? It is certainly a possibility, though we will not know for sure until Samsung's Unpacked event on February 20, during which it is expected to formally introduce the Galaxy S10 family, along with a folding phone of some sort. For what it's worth, though, the Galaxy S10 Plus is rumored to ship with 12GB of RAM and up to 1TB of internal storage. Either way, it's a big deal that Samsung...
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Although its SSD 970 EVO and 970 Pro solid state drives are widely considered to be some of the best currently available for the PC, Samsung is at the ready with a brand new line of drives dubbed the SSD 970 EVO Plus. As its name suggests, the Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus is similar to the original EVOs, but these new drives leverage Samsung’s latest TLC NAND flash memory. The firmware on these SSDs has been further optimized to increase performance as well, but they leverage the same controller and have similar amounts of DRAM on-board. We’ve got a table below comparing the 970 EVO Plus series specifications to the original EVOs. As you can see, there are only a few areas that differ....
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Western Digital is one of the world’s largest storage manufacturers with a wide array of products to meet their customer's unique needs. Its My Passport Wireless line of external drives offer more than just convenient storage. With on-board Wi-Fi, battery, and SD card readers, WD bills them as a working photographer’s best friend. That certainly sounds like a common use case for a device like this, but will this latest WD My Passport live up to its promise? WD sent over their latest My Passport Wireless SSD for us to use and review. The SSD version is available in capacities from 250GB to a spacious 2TB. They range in price from $199.99 to $749.99 respectively. Our unit is the...
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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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Consumers have never had more choices if they need to purchase storage, whether it's hard drives, flash drives, solid-state drives, or even cloud or network-attached storage. Save for a couple of blips, prices have steadily creeped downward and today you can score a 10TB hard drive for only $300, or a measly $0.03 per gigabyte. For many users, that's plenty of space -- more than enough to store their movies, photos, music, and documents. For others, though, 10TB just won't cut it. For those users, thankfully, it's almost HAMR time... With "heat-assisted magnetic recording", or HAMR, Seagate will use heat to increase density much further than they can be with traditional PMR (perpendicular...
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Seagate is flexing its mechanical hard drive line like its 1999, only with much larger capacities for the modern era. Sure, many of us have moved on to solid state drives, at least for our primary storage. But there is still a market for good old fashioned HDDs. Several markets, actually, and Seagate hopes to serve them all with several new 14 terabyte models. The storage maker updated its entire range of HDDs with new 14TB models, including its IronWolf and IronWolf Pro for network attached storage (NAS) appliances, BarraCuda Pro for consumer desktops, SkyHawk for surveillance applications, and Exos X14 for hyperscale data centers. In other words, there's a 14TB model for everyone. "Data protection,...
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One thing we always seem to think we have plenty of, yet always seems to run out before we expect it, is storage for our mobile devices. With smartphones taking higher resolution photos and video internal storage doesn’t last long. For iPhone users, this means you eventually end up spending more for cloud storage or deleting things so that you can store more apps and pictures. For Android users running out of storage means you can opt for a larger memory card so you that can keep filming and snapping away. For those users, Amazon has a smoking deal on the SanDisk Ultra 256GB microSDXC card. As of writing, you can get your mitts on the memory card for $73.94 with free Prime shipping....
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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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If you're a Dropbox customer paying for the service, you'll be glad to know that a free storage upgrade is coming your way. Dropbox has updated its Business Standard plan from 2TB of data to 3TB for the same $12.50 per user per month charge. Dropbox says that these storage updates will allow users to upload more UHD video files, offload images from their smartphones, and share large files with clients (a la CADs). The Dropbox Professional plan for individuals is also seeing a storage increase, doubling in capacity from 1TB to 2TB for the same $16.58 per month. Dropbox Plus keeps its current $8.25 monthly rate and the same 1TB of storage space that money gets you. For teams needing all the...
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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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