After recently telling investors that they’re planning to make a record $27 Trillion Won ($23.59 Billion USD) investment this year, Samsung recently announced that they’re planning another $1 Billion investment towards their manufacturing facility at Austin, Texas in 1H2017. According to Samsung, the investment will be used to enhance production capabilities of their System LSI plants which produce advanced SoCs (system-on-chip) products for devices such as smartphones, tablets, etc.

Samsung’s Austin Fab, also known as Fab S2 is one of Samsung’s most advanced semiconductor fabrication facilities, producing chips using their 14nm FinFET [...]

It’s no secret that China isn’t afraid to spend big to acquire technology and that kind of money can sometimes test your loyalty especially if you happen to be an employee with access to some very valuable technology.

Case in point. A recent report from Korean site Daum recently reported that a Senior Samsung LSI employee by the name of Mr. Lee was recently arrested on suspicions that he was attempting to sell confidential information on Samsung phone technology to competitors in China. This includes information about Samsung’s 14nm and 10nm fabrication process which is important for not only their smartphone technology, but also in their foundry [...]

If you’ve been following the SandForce story over the past couple years, you’ll know that it’s been quite a ride for SandForce and their upcoming SF3700 SSD controller. Shortly after announcing the LSI SandForce SF3700 back in late 2013, LSI, the then owner of SandForce controller technology, was acquired by Avago who then turned around and sold LSI’s Flash Components Division to Seagate within the same year. As such, the SandForce SF3700 controller faced multiple delays which may or may not have been expected given SandForce’s original expectation of SF3700’s arrival by the end of last year.

Obviously an end of 2014 launch of [...]

In the past couple days, I wrote several articles about the new server hardware and colocation infrastructure powering CPCR. If you’ve already read those articles, you’ll probably already know that I picked up several Lenovo ThinkServer RD540’s for the task. Since there’s so much more to the ThinkServer RD540 than I wanted to talk about in a general overview of our hosting infrastructure, I decided to do a separate article on just the ThinkServer RD540 itself.

The Lenovo ThinkServer RD540 was launched back in late 2013 alongside the ThinkServer RD640. The main difference between the two is that the [...]

When I originally founded Custom PC Review back in 2012, it was nothing more than a small personal blog running off some run of the mill shared hosting. Since then the site has grown quite a bit, and along with the type of infrastructure hosting the site as well.

The first type of hosting infrastructure for CPCR was shared hosting. While shared hosting was a good, cheap option to get started, the site faced constant crashes as soon as any surge of traffic rolled in. Several months after starting the site I was facing more downtime than uptime, so I decided it was time to upgrade to a VPS. Unlike shared hosting where tons of sites are all hosted [...]

In a joint announcement recently made by Seagate and Micron, the two storage juggernauts recently revealed that they’ve entered into a multi-year strategic agreement, combining their expertise to more quickly and more effectively deliver industry leading storage solutions. While most of the finer details of their partnership was left out of the announcement, Seagate and Micron revealed that their initial focus will be on next generation SAS SSDs and strategic NAND supply with future collaboration opportunities to follow.

Our Take

Seagate is trying hard to work their way into the SSD market and it looks like the pieces to making it happen [...]

Ever since LSI SandForce (now Seagate) first announced their highly anticipated SF3700 controller late last year, we’ve never really received a definitive answer on when SSDs using the upcoming controller would be shipping… until now. In a recent interview at FMS with Kent Smith, Sr. Director of Product Management Flash Components Division at LSI, we were told that SSDs with the SF3700 are expected to ship by the end of the year.

In our discussions with SandForce, their message  appears to be similar to the message we received at Computex earlier this year. SandForce is touting not only 100% read/write performance, but also mixed workload performance [...]

Over the past year or so, it’s been no secret that OCZ has had a bit of a rough time in the market, but with the sale of their company to Toshiba late last year, OCZ has quickly been turning themselves around with several new product introductions to complete their transition from the old OCZ Technology Group to the new OCZ Storage Solutions, a Toshiba Group Company.

As a part of their transition, OCZ has been revamping their entire product stack to utilize parent company Toshiba’s NAND. By doing so, this will not only allow OCZ to put top quality NAND in their SSDs, but also provides OCZ with better cost [...]

After announcing the SandForce SF3700 back in November of last year, LSI SandForce and their board partners have been relatively quiet on the upcoming controller. At CES earlier this year, we were hopeful that LSI was going to announce that drives with the SF3700 would be shipping soon, but instead we were greeted with news that they were still working on the firmware to lower heat/increase performance, and it wouldn’t be until 2H 2014 when SSDs would begin shipping with the upcoming controller.

For Computex then, we were confident that LSI SandForce would announce that they had begun shipping the SF3700 series controllers, but once again we were [...]

With LSI’s SandForce division changing hands numerous times within a matter of months and the seemingly endless delays with SandForce’s long anticipated SF3700 series controller, even SandForce’s largest partners are looking into different controller options for their upcoming SSD offerings.

At a recent HyperX event here at Computex, Kingston recently introduced a new HyperX PCIe x4 SSD this time around with a Marvell 88SS9293 (Codename Altaplus) controller. The HyperX SSD is also paired with Toshiba’s latest 2nd generation 19nm toggle mode MLC NAND.

Kingston didn’t provide much additional information about the upcoming [...]