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...
AnandTech Webcast Live 11/13 at 9AM PST/12PM EST from SC12: Ask Your Intel SSD DC S3700 Questions Here
There's a bunch of cool stuff happening at this year's Supercomputing conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. For starters, we'll get to see the updated list of the world's...
33 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/9/2012The Intel SSD DC S3700 (200GB) Review
When Intel arrived on the scene with its first SSD, it touted superiority in controller, firmware and NAND as the reason it was able to so significantly outperform the...
30 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/9/2012Rescheduling the Intel SSD DC S3700 Review
This is a rare situation so I thought I'd post a quick explanation here. There was a miscommunication relating to the exact date and time of the embargo lift...
14 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/6/2012The Intel SSD DC S3700: Intel's 3rd Generation Controller Analyzed
Today Intel is announcing its first SSD based on its own custom 6Gbps SATA controller. This new controller completely abandons the architecture of the old X25-M/320/710 SSDs and adopts...
43 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/5/2012Intel SSD 335 (240GB) Review
Back in February, Intel released its first SandForce based SSD: the Intel SSD 520. Since then Intel's SSD lineup has evolved. A couple of months after the 520's release...
70 by Kristian Vättö on 10/29/2012Understanding Apple's Fusion Drive
During its iPad mini launch event today Apple updated many members of its Mac lineup. The 13-inch MacBook Pro, iMac and Mac mini all got updated today. For the...
87 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 10/24/2012OWC Mercury Electra 3G MAX 960GB Review: 1TB of NAND in 2.5" Form Factor
The decrease in NAND prices has opened doors for bigger SSD capacities. 512GB SSDs have been available for a couple of years now but even though prices have come...
38 by Kristian Vättö on 10/18/2012Micron P320h PCIe SSD (700GB) Review
Well over a year ago Micron announced something unique in a sea of PCIe SSDs that were otherwise nothing more than SATA drives in RAID on a PCIe card...
57 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 10/15/2012Samsung SSD 840 (250GB) Review
Samsung has been making steady progress in becoming one of the major players in the consumer SSD market. Even before the SSD 470, Samsung was a major player in...
86 by Kristian Vättö on 10/8/2012The AnandTech Podcast: Episode 7
We're back with another podcast. This time we start out with a discussion of Borderlands 2 and philosophies on sidequests in games. We briefly talk about TI defocusing its...
48 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 10/1/2012Samsung SSD 840: Preliminary Benchmarks
I just got back from Seoul last night where Samsung held their SSD Global Summit for the first time. As a souvenir, Samsung gave us all an 840 SSD...
12 by Kristian Vättö on 9/27/2012Samsung SSD 840 Pro (256GB) Review
If we had an award for most improved in the SSD space, it would have to go to Samsung. When we first encountered Samsung MLC drives a few years...
96 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/24/2012Samsung Releases TLC NAND Based 840 SSD
Along with Samsung's release of the 840 Pro SSD today, Samsung is also releasing a more mainstream oriented 840 SSD. It's based around the same Samsung MDX controller as...
29 by Kristian Vättö on 9/24/2012Breaking the SATA Barrier: SATA Express and SFF-8639 Connectors
Pretty much all high-end client SSDs have no issues saturating the current 6Gbps SATA interface. We've talked about a move to PCIe based SSDs but these are the connectors...
20 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/13/2012NGFF SSDs: Putting an End to Proprietary Ultrabook SSD Form Factors
We've seen a bunch of custom SSD form factors with the arrival of Ultrabooks as well as systems like the MacBook Air and Retina MacBook Pro. The need is...
41 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/13/2012OCZ Vector: The First True Indilinx Based SSD (Barefoot 3) from OCZ
I just saw the outcome of a year long effort from both the Indilinx and the PLX teams at OCZ: the Vector SSD (pictured above). Unlike the Octane and...
18 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/11/2012Promise Pegasus J2 Review: The Smallest High Performance Thunderbolt Drive
Promise was the first to get us a Thunderbolt chassis with the Pegasus R4/R6. Not only was the Pegasus the first shipping Thunderbolt storage chassis, but it continues to...
25 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/2/2012OCZ Agility 4 (256GB) Review
For the last few years, OCZ's consumer SSD lineup has primarily consisted of two models: Vertex and Agility. The history of these two goes all the way back to...
41 by Kristian Vättö on 9/1/2012Fall Budget System Buyer's Guide
Most of the systems I build for friends and clients are destined to spend their days performing basic computing tasks like checking email and Facebook accounts, shopping for shoes...
39 by Zach Throckmorton on 9/1/2012Plextor M5 Pro (256GB) Review
Plextor has been making steady progress in becoming a real player in the SSD market. As we saw with the M3 Pro, they have a firmware team capable of...
37 by Kristian Vättö on 8/31/2012