Last year I was fortunate enough to be among the first to review the Samsung T3 Portable SSD. The drive was small, durable, fast, available in capacities up to 2TB, and relatively good looking making it not only my favorite portable SSD, but also my most highly recommended as well.

Of course, with Samsung’s annual release cycles, Samsung recently launched the new Samsung T5 Portable SSD which we’ll be reviewing today.

Things are getting heated between Toshiba and Western Digital as Toshiba has recently filed a lawsuit against Western Digital over alleged violation of the Unfair Competition Prevention Act and Civil Code, and is seeking $120 billion yen ($1.07 billion USD) in compensation along with a permanent injunction. In their recent press release, Toshiba accused Western Digital of intentionally delaying the sale of TMC (Toshiba Memory Company) and improperly obtaining trade secrets through their joint venture partnership.

Toshiba claims that Western Digital delayed the sale of TMC by publicly and privately exaggerating its “consent right”, a clause in Western [...]

When a company is forced to sell a highly profitable business in a high growth industry with very few players involved, everyone takes notice. With Toshiba’s memory business, a number of big names such as Western Digital, SK Hynix, Broadcom, Foxconn, TSMC and more have already entered bids for a majority stake in the company, but it looks like competition is about to get a whole lot more intense.

According to a new report from KoreaHerald, as many as 10 companies have entered bids for the Toshiba memory business including heavyweights such as Amazon, Apple, and Google. While these companies are traditionally not in the business of selling SSDs, they heavily [...]

Market research firm, Forward Insights, recently released their 2016 SSD marketshare report and according to the report, 63 million SSDs were shipped in the channel over the past year despite the NAND shortage that occurred during a significant portion of the year. The channel market includes distributors, resellers, retail/e-tail, system builders, and solution providers.

As expected, Samsung took the #1 spot for SSDs shipped in the channel, racking up 21% of the market, or 13.23 million units. Following in the #2 spot is Kingston, which took 16% of the market, or 10.08 million units. This is followed by SanDisk, Micron, A-DATA and Toshiba with between 5%-7% [...]

When Samsung launched the Samsung 960 series SSD at their annual SSD Global Summit back in September, they promised two new drives – the Samsung 960 PRO and the Samsung 960 EVO.

Last month, we reviewed the Samsung 960 PRO which is designed for performance enthusiasts and professionals. In our testing, it exceeded our expectations making it the fastest M.2 PCIe SSD we’ve ever tested to date. Unforutnately, the Samsung 960 EVO wasn’t available at the time however, Samsung was hopeful that early samples would be available soon.

Fast forward and today we’ll be reviewing the Samsung 960 EVO, which is Samsung’s [...]

With SATA SSDs now at their limit, last year Samsung introduced the Samsung 950 PRO which marked the first time Samsung had introduced a NVMe PCIe SSD for the consumer market. Although Samsung already had OEM PCIe SSDs for quite some time and given that the technology was ready to go, it was only a matter of time until the Samsung 950 PRO was brought into the retail market. Given that the Samsung 950 PRO is a Samsung SSD and not a Samsung smartphone (too soon?) the Samsung 950 PRO did very well in the market quickly establishing itself as the defacto performance NVMe PCIe SSD to buy since it was launched last year.

Of course if you’re Samsung [...]

After officially closing on the SanDisk acquisition earlier this year, it looks like Western Digital is reaping the benefits of the acquisition with the introduction two new SSDs – the WD Blue and WD Green SSD.

The WD Blue SSD is WD’s mainstream offering, similar to what we get from their HDD lineup. Powered by a Marvell 88SS1074 controller paired with SanDisk 15nm TLC flash, the WD Blue is capable of performance up to 545 MB/s sequential reads and 525 MB/s sequential writes. Random read/write performance is expected to reach up to 100K/80K IOPS.

The WD Blue SSD will be offered in capacities of 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB. [...]

At Flash Memory Summit earlier this year, Samsung announced their new 48-layer 3D V-NAND and along with that they announced that they’ll be using the new NAND in their 850 EVO SSD, pushing capacities up to a staggering 4TB. Considering 1TB was the largest capacity just 4-5 years ago, a 4TB drive designed for the consumer is a really huge deal, no pun intended. As such, when we got the opportunity to test the monstrous 4TB Samsung 850 EVO SSD, we jumped on it.

Western Digital recently announced that they’re now demoing the new 1TB SanDisk Extreme PRO SDXC memory card prototype at the Photokina show now happening in Cologne, Germany.

“Showcasing the most advanced imaging technologies is truly exciting for us,” said Dinesh Bahal, vice president, product management, Content Solutions Business Unit, Western Digital. “Sixteen years ago we introduced the first SanDisk 64MB SD™ card and today we are enabling capacities of 1TB. Over the years our goal has remained the same; continue to innovate and set the pace for the imaging industry. The SanDisk 1TB SD card prototype represents another significant achievement as growth of [...]

Ever since Toshiba’s acquisition of OCZ back in 2014, we’ve seen a gradual move away from not only the OCZ branding, but also many Toshiba inspired internal changes in its SSDs. OCZ, which changed its name to OCZ Storage Solutions last year, is now Toshiba OCZ and the SSDs themselves are now practically re-branded Toshiba products with slightly modified firmware, additional bundled software, and modified retail packaging for the consumer SSD market. Why Toshiba hasn’t dropped the entire OCZ brand as a whole I’m not quite sure, but it seems like they’re preparing to drop the axe.

Along with the change in [...]