When we look at the SSD market today, there’s two distinct group of consumers. On one hand are the enthusiasts who are willing to pay for the highest performance drives ever produced. These are the guys looking into high end SATA and PCIe drives, but aren’t really a huge part of the total consumer SSD market. On the other hand is the bulk of the SSD market which is filled with entry level and mainstream consumers who just want a cost effective product that can give them a SSD user experience. These are the guys looking for the most cost effective solution possible as most of their time spent on a computer simply revolves around starting up a computer, [...]

At CES earlier this year, Kingston had probably one of the biggest product showings we’ve seen in the past few years. Along with new flash drives, memory cards, and gaming peripherals, Kingston also showed off several new SSDs including their new flagship HyperX Predator PCIe SSD, several new enterprise SSDs, and a new mid-range HyperX SATA SSD, the Kingston HyperX Savage.

After several years of selling the SandForce SF-2281 powered HyperX and HyperX 3K SSDs as the Kingston HyperX SSD lineup, Kingston is now moving to newer controller technologies with the HyperX Predator using Marvell and the HyperX Savage using Phison. Of [...]

OCZ’s biggest product announcement at Computex 2015 is the Trion 100 series SSD, which is squarely designed for the cost conscious mainstream consumer. To achieve this, the Trion 100 leverages not only Toshiba’s A19nm TLC, but also an all new Toshiba Alishan controller.

We thought it was strange that OCZ would still use A19nm with 15nm on the horizon, but we were told that A19nm is a more mature, more well understood process than 15nm which is why A19nm was used. Future iterations of the drive will certainly see a shift to 15nm. As for the controller, we weren’t told much about it other than the fact that we’ll be seeing more [...]

CES 2015 was a pretty big show for the entire storage industry as a whole and OCZ in particular had a strong showing this year with the unveil of their highly anticipated JetExpress controller. Along with JetExpress, OCZ was also proud to say that they’re now putting the final touches on their integration with Toshiba which includes converting their entire SSD lineup to utilize Toshiba’s latest A19nm Toggle Mode MLC NAND.

Although OCZ’s Vector series drives have been using Toshiba first generation 19nm Toggle Mode MLC since the Vector 150 was launched in late 2013, it’s now finally being replaced with the OCZ Vector 180 [...]

While OCZ’s biggest focus for CES 2015 was their upcoming JetExpress SSD controller, OCZ also took the opportunity to talk to us about their new OCZ Vector 180 consumer SSD and the OCZ Z-Drive 6000 enterprise SSD.

The OCZ Vector 180 will be OCZ’s latest flagship consumer SATA SSD which will replace the aging Vector 150 introduced back in late 2013. Component wise, OCZ is still sticking with the Barefoot 3 M00 controller, but it’ll now use Toshiba’s latest second generation 19nm (A19nm) toggle mode NAND. No surprises there. Performance on the drive is rated at up to 550/530 MB/s sequential reads/writes and 100K/95K IOPS 4K random [...]

Without a doubt, CES 2015 has been a huge show for SSD companies as practically everybody had something interesting to show. One of those companies is OCZ Storage Solutions who was quite excited to reveal their upcoming JetExpress SSD controller, which according to the company had been in the works for several years.

The biggest feature for the new JetExpress controller is that it’s going to be very versatile. With a physical footprint that can fit into a 22mm wide M.2 form factor, the JetExpress controller will natively support both PCIe Gen 3 x4 and SATA along with AHCI and NVMe. This will allow both future consumer and enterprise SATA and PCIe SSDs to utilize [...]

Two months ago, we had the opportunity to be one of the first reviewers to take a look at the Crucial MX100 SSD. At the time, we came away very impressed with the drive as it delivered great performance, great features and is backed by Crucial’s fantastic track record for reliability while still being one of the least expensive SSDs on the market.

Unfortunately, Crucial only sent us the 256GB version of the MX100 at the time, which is a lower performing drive than the 512GB version of the product. While were more than happy to review the more commonly purchased 256GB capacity, the smaller capacity drive is at a substantial disadvantage when we [...]

A couple years ago, AMD made an interesting move to expand their Radeon line of products to not only contain graphics cards, but memory modules as well. This made a lot of sense for AMD at the time as licensing their brand name brought in additional profit and having branded memory line helps consumers easily pick out the best memory for their AMD systems. Given that AMD doesn’t actually have a memory business, AMD decided to partner with Patriot Memory to produce specially validated AMD Radeon Memory, which would offer AMD system builders guaranteed compatibility with their systems.

Of course, there are a number of pieces that go into a great gaming PC, and as [...]

Among the numerous SSD announcements here at Computex 2014, OCZ Storage Solutions also displayed a brand new SSD, the OCZ Vector 180 Series aimed at the enthusiast/entry level server market. Armed with the Indilinx Barefoot 3 M00 controller and Toshiba A19nm (2nd Gen) MLC Toggle NAND, the Vector 180 is expected to be capable of performance up to 550 MB/s and 100,000 IOPS.

While the OCZ Vector 180 will be sold as a client drive under the Vector line, it’s truly aimed at the low end enterprise markets such as read intensive servers or hyperscale datacenters. Speaking with OCZ Storage Solutions Executive VP & CMO Alex Mei, he told us that one of the big [...]

The last few months haven’t been pretty for OCZ. Late in November of last year, OCZ hit rock bottom when they filed for bankruptcy, and within the next two months, Toshiba purchased the then defunct OCZ’s assets for a paltry price of $35 million. Considering only a couple years ago, OCZ was valued at over $1 Billion, Toshiba got a pretty sweet deal for a ton of valuable IP.

Following Toshiba’s acquisition, it seemed like Toshiba would be most interested in merging OCZ with their own SSD division; however, with Toshiba recently completing the OCZ acquisition, it’s been made clear that OCZ will continue to [...]