At the Samsung’s SSD Global Summit in South Korea, the company officially unveiled their next generation SSDs. All the models launched use the M.2 connector based around the NVMe (PCI Express SSD) standard. The new 960 PRO SSD is the successor to the 950 PRO, launched at last year’s Global Summit as Samsung’s first M.2 PCIe SSD for the retail market. The new 960 EVO introduces a more affordable option based on TLC NAND flash. Earlier this year, Samsung released the SM961 and PM961, a new generation of OEM M.2 PCIe SSDs. These brought V-NAND to the OEM side of the family and introduced a new Samsung “Polaris” SSD
Did HP Equalize Desktop and Notebook Performance with AMD FirePro?
For as long as I can remember, the quest of equalizing desktop and mobile performance haunts every manufacturer. However, notebooks are thermally challenged environments and you simply can’t put desktop components inside, unless you’re talking about heavy duty desktop replacements from manufacturers such as Eurocom. Still, a lot of progress is being made with the form factor even from the biggest companies on the market. Last September, HP introduced value oriented Z workstations. HP Focuses the Z series on “3D CAD, Design Visualization, CAM and Simulation”, and starting at $879 all the way into the low five digit range. HP openly states that moving to an M.2, NVMe
Seagate Presents World’s Fastest SSDs
Seven months ago, Steve Luczo (CEO) stated that “there is no one that is using SSDs for storage.” This statement still haunts Seagate Technologies, LLC to this date, even though it was out of context. “I mean, maybe at the margin for replacing boot drives… I mean, maybe one or three per cent of the hierarchy is SSDs for storage. Most of our flash product is actually not hanging off the storage bus, it is fast memory.” As it usually goes, the dismissive statements come at the time when you know that you have a good thing coming down the line, but you need to hold the fort.
PREVIEW: OCZ’s RevoDrive 400 Looks Like a Great SSD
Ever since the company got acquired by Toshiba, OCZ Storage Solutions focused on more performance for the enthusiasts and expanding the market share in the fast-growing segment of enterprise storage. On CES 2016, OCZ introduced several new products, basing them on NVMe PCI Express Gen 3 standard. For the enthusiasts, OCZ launched RevoDrive 400 Series. Unlike RevoDrive 350 (which featured non-removable memory on the add-in PCIe card), the all-new RevoDrive 400 now comes as an M.2 form factor product with an additional PCIe x4 add-in card – very similar to Kingston’s HyperX Predator. By moving to M.2 form factor, RevoDrive 400 can now be installed not just in desktop, but
Kingston Launches DDR4 Memory, PCIe SSDs for Intel Skylake
Following the announcement of Intel Skylake-K processor for gamers and enthusiasts and the new chipset, known as the Z170 PCH (Processor Communications Hub), memory manufacturers introduced new products to support the platform. HyperX, a division of Kingston Technology Company, Inc. announced several new products optimized for Skylake. The company launched several 8GB and 16GB memory kits from the Fury family and now offers memory kits with two and four DIMM modules. Memory kits are available in low-latency 2133MHz (CL14), and CL15 versions at 2400 and 2666MHz. With Intel Core i5-6600K and i7-6700K, we are looking at very good bandwidth of 34.1GB/s for the 2133MHz, 38.4GB/s for 2400
VisionTek GRX 240GB PCIe SSD Review
Introduction Over the last couple of years, SSDs have taken the market by storm. Once we leave the lowest budget segments of the market, a SSD is almost always part of a modern PC build. SSDs noticeably boost a PCs performance mainly due to their random data access times being orders of magnitude lower than on traditional rotation hard disk drives which makes them so desirable for the user. Transfer rates also increased beyond what hard disk drives are capable of and quickly hit the limits of what the Serial ATA interface is capable of. This led to the introduction of novel form factor SSD
Corsair to launch SSD drives ala Fusion-io and OCZ?
Recently, Corsair Memory launched its first Solid State Disk, with 128GB capacity. Since the performance wasn’t earth shattering (as opposed to already-established memory, power supplies and memory sticks), I expected that this first product was nothing else but tapping into the highly lucrative market. However, after reading the press release, a statement from John Carlton, Corsair’s VP of Marketing stood out like supernova in otherwise dark universe: “Our engineering team is currently hard at work on even higher performance and higher-capacity drives with read and write-speeds expected to be in in excess of 200MB/s. Even more exciting is a version for the hardcore enthusiast that