SSDs
When Western Digital introduced its Ultrastar DC SN861 SSDs earlier this year, the company did not disclose which controller it used for these drives, which made many observers presume that WD was using an in-house controller. But a recent teardown of the drive shows that is not the case; instead, the company is using a controller from Fadu, a South Korean company founded in 2015 that specializes on enterprise-grade turnkey SSD solutions. The Western Digital Ultrastar DC SN861 SSD is aimed at performance-hungry hyperscale datacenters and enterprise customers which are adopting PCIe Gen5 storage devices these days. And, as uncovered in photos from a recent Storage Review article, the drive is based on Fadu's FC5161 NVMe 2.0-compliant controller. The FC5161 utilizes 16 NAND channels supporting...
Corsair Unveils New Flash Storage Solutions
In their long list of new product announcements today, Corsair is also upgrading their top performance SSD drives lineup with the release of the Neutron XT SSDs. We already...
0 by E. Fylladitakis on 1/6/2015Samsung Releases External T1 SSD
Traditionally the external flash storage space has been run by so called second tier OEMs that basically just buy the controller and NAND from third parties and then do...
22 by Kristian Vättö on 1/5/2015SanDisk Announces Entry-Level SSD Plus & Ultra II mSATA
Back in September SanDisk launched the Ultra II for the mainstream market and it's been doing pretty well in the market so far. Today here at CES SanDisk is...
10 by Kristian Vättö on 1/5/2015Western Digital Shows Off a 128GB SSD + 4TB HDD 3.5" SATA Express Dual-Drive
Storage Visions kicked off today and on the show floor Western Digital was showcasing a prototype of its new 3.5" dual-drive. The drive consists of a 128GB SSD along...
18 by Kristian Vättö on 1/4/2015Crossbar's Resistive RAM Technology Reaching Commercialisation Stage
While the first 3D NAND chips have just found their way to the market and most NAND manufacturers are still developing their designs, there are already a handful of...
65 by Kristian Vättö on 12/21/2014Best SSDs: Holiday 2014
We published our last 'Best SSDs' article in July and to be completely honest the core of my recommendations has remained unchanged, but there are a couple of new...
38 by Kristian Vättö on 12/15/2014G.Skill Phoenix Blade (480GB) PCIe SSD Review
G.Skill hasn't been a very visible SSD OEM lately. Like many DRAM module companies, G.Skill entered the market early around 2009 when the market was very immature and profits...
62 by Kristian Vättö on 12/12/2014Samsung SSD 850 EVO (120GB, 250GB, 500GB & 1TB) Review
Samsung hasn't stopped impressing me in the SSD space. The early Samsung SSDs weren't very good, but ever since the introduction of the SSD 830 Samsung has been doing...
97 by Kristian Vättö on 12/8/2014Intel's 3D NAND to Ship in H2'15: 256Gbit Die & 32 Layers
Last Thursday in its annual Investor Meeting Intel revealed the first details of its 3D NAND technology and announced that it will begin the shipments of 3D NAND in...
58 by Kristian Vättö on 11/25/2014Corsair Neutron XT (240GB, 480GB & 960GB) SSD Review: Phison S10 Debuts
The ugly truth is that the SSD market has been tough for almost all the typical PC component vendors lately. With Samsung, SanDisk, and Micron/Crucial being serious about the...
57 by Kristian Vättö on 11/17/2014Intel Launches M.2 and Larger Capacity 2.5" SSD DC S3500 Models
Two years ago Intel released the DC S3500 and S3700 SSDs that marked as the company's first truly in-house SATA 6Gbps SSDs. Today Intel is adding M.2 form factor...
10 by Kristian Vättö on 11/11/2014Upgrading the SSD in Chromebook & MyDigitalSSD Super Boot Drive M.2 2242 SSD Review
The majority of the Chromebooks tend to have 16GB of onboard storage with some high-end models having twice that. For the intended usage where everything is done in the...
67 by Kristian Vättö on 10/21/2014Samsung Releases Firmware Update to Fix the SSD 840 EVO Read Performance Bug
The news of Samsung's SSD 840 EVO read performance degradation started circulating around the Internet about a month ago. Shortly after this, Samsung announced that they have found the...
95 by Kristian Vättö on 10/16/2014Micron M600 (128GB, 256GB & 1TB) SSD Review
Those that have been following the SSD industry for a couple of years are likely aware that Micron does not sell retail drives under its own brand (unlike, e.g...
56 by Kristian Vättö on 9/29/2014Firmware Update to Fix the Samsung SSD 840 EVO Read Performance Bug Coming on October 15th
A week ago Samsung acknowledged the existence of the read performance bug in the SSD 840 EVO and I just received a note that the fixed firmware is in...
84 by Kristian Vättö on 9/26/2014Samsung Acknowledges the SSD 840 EVO Read Performance Bug - Fix Is on the Way
During the last couple of weeks, numerous reports of Samsung SSD 840 and 840 EVO having low read performance have surfaced around the Internet. The most extensive one is...
116 by Kristian Vättö on 9/19/2014SanDisk Ultra II (240GB) SSD Review
For nearly two years Samsung was the only manufacturer with an SSD that utilized TLC NAND. Most of the other manufacturers had talked about TLC SSDs in one way...
54 by Kristian Vättö on 9/16/2014Micron Launches M600 Client SSD for OEMs/SIs
Micron/Crucial has been one of the go-to manufacturers for value client SSDs during the past couple of years, but the one thing that the company has lacked is a...
15 by Kristian Vättö on 9/16/2014PCIe SSD Faceoff: Samsung XP941 (128GB & 256GB) and OCZ RevoDrive 350 (480GB) Tested
We are currently on the verge of PCIe transition. Nearly every SSD controller vendor has shown or at least talked about their upcoming PCIe designs, and the first ones...
47 by Kristian Vättö on 9/5/2014Samsung SSD 845DC EVO/PRO Performance Preview & Exploring IOPS Consistency
Traditionally Samsung's enterprise SSDs have only been available to large server OEMs (e.g. Dell, EMC, and IBM). In other words, unless you were buying tens of thousands of drives...
31 by Kristian Vättö on 9/3/2014