New game bundle of Samsung’s new SSD and Far Cry Series.
OCZ Launches Vertex 460A SSD
Top Five Notebooks of 2014
With the holidays approaching fast many people will be getting new notebooks this holiday season, we give you our pick for the top 5.
Visiontek releases new USB Pocket SSDs
Visiontek released its brand new USB Pocket SSDs today in both 120GB and 240GB versions.
G. Skill Unveils High-Capacity Phoenix Blade Series SSD
G. Skill’s enthusiast grade SSD comes with 480 GB of capacity and uses PCIe to provide more bandwidth.
SanDisk Reports Lukewarm Earnings for Q3 2014
SanDisk reported record revenues for the third quarter of 2014, but disappointed on profit, showing a quarterly and year over year decrease.
Yet to be Announced OCZ ARC 100 Solid State Drives Make Appearance Online
OCZ has yet to give its upcoming line of ARC 100 SSDs the official unveiling, but it looks like two retailers have beat OCZ to it. First spotted by Legit Reviews, both Amazon.com and Scan.co.uk have posted drives in the series online for pre-order. Drives in the series will be available in 120 GB, 240 GB and 480 GB capacities and are capable of sequential read speeds of 490 MB/s and reach write speeds 430 MB/s (400 MB/s for the 120 GB model) and 80,000 IOPS. The SSD series sports a 2.5-inch form factor, a Barefoot 3 M10 controller and 19nm MLC NAND chips supplied
HGST Showcases 'Fastest Ever' SSD
Storage company HGST demonstrated this weekend at the Flash Memory Summit 2014 in San Jose, California what it calls the “world’s fastest” SSD. HGST’s new SSD uses a PCIe interface and delivers three million random read IOPS of 512 bytes and random read access times of 1.5ms. Latency was reportedly close to 1us. HGST says this performance is orders of magnitude faster than existing Flash based SSDs. “The PCM SSD demonstration is a great example for how HGST sets the pace of the rapidly evolving storage industry,” said Steve Campbell, HGST’s Chief Technology Officer, in a release. “This technology is the result of several years
Origin PC Offers $200 Back to School Deals
Our buddies over at Origin PC are having a pretty sweet Back to School deal, depending on which product you buy from them. If you’re in the market for a sweet gaming desktop or a high-end EON gaming notebook from them, then you can expect to get a free upgrade to a 240 GB SSD from VisionTek as well as a free copy of Watch Dogs. Or, if you’re in the market for something like their EVO15-S gaming laptop, then you can get free ground shipping across the US, a free 2 year part replacement warranty (standard is one year), and a free copy of
Kingston Launches SSDNow V310 960GB SSD
Remember when we were at Computex and Kingston had given us a special sneek peek at their new SSDs? Well, the SSDNow V310 was among one of those drives, but we didn’t know when it was going to be launched. Today marks the day that Kingston launches their new SSDNow V310 SSD with a 960GB capacity, which they’re calling 1TB. Since it isn’t a 1024GB SSD, we’re not going to be calling it a 1TB SSD, even if Kingston is just because once you format this drive you’ll probably be looking at under 900GB of formatted space. We’ve included some of the photos that we
SanDisk to buy FusionIO for $1.1 billion, Consolidation Continues
SanDisk and FusionIO have entered into an agreement where SanDisk will purchase all of FusionIO and its assets to the tune of $1.1 billion in cash, once again continuing the consolidation of the NAND flash market into fewer bigger companies. This announcement is likely a response to Seagate’s recent acquisition of the NAND flash division of Avago which included the SandForce controller division. However, the real truth is that FusionIO is not anywhere near a consumer flash storage company and most of their customers are professionals or enterprise while most of SandForce’s products are consumer focused. I’m sure SanDisk would have loved to buy both
Kingston's Newest Products Shown at Computex 2014
At Computex 2014, Kingston had a lot of products to show attendees at their HyperX suite which also featured Kingston’s HOT (HyperX OC Takeover) where overclockers competed for a share of $10,000 in prize money. The rest of the floor was shared by Kingston’s various new products, some never seen before, and others updated since CES. The main stage was where Kingston would show off these products as well as host their League of Legends competition. We got a private tour of all of the products that Kingston currently has to offer, including the lowdown on how the company is rebranding their HyperX line of
Xi3 Announces They Build NUCs, Too
In a bizarre twist of the company’s product strategy, they have decided to go with Intel and start to sell customized NUCs. That’s right, you can now buy a fully customized NUC (they add the SSD, RAM and OS) from Xi3 Corporation and they’ll send it to you. Don’t mind the fact that almost ANYONE can build a NUC PC by simply following the instructions and essentially requires 10 minutes to build. Or don’t mind the fact that Xi3 has been building NUC competitors for years and wasn’t really getting much traction, so I guess if you can’t beat ’em join ’em? Xi3 was originally
Crucial to Launch SSDs with 16nm Memory Chips
As Computex is getting ready to open its doors in and around Taipei, the capital of Taiwan – more products are leaking to the surface. Thanks to a Spanish e-tailer PCComponentes, we learned of one such product coming to the market comes from the States, in the form of Crucial’s Solid State Drive (SSD). MX100 line of SSDs will mark the beginning of the end for memory chips produced using the 20nm process. While the 128GB drive will carry the 20nm MLC NAND memory chips, 256GB and 512GB models will feature brand new 16nm NAND flash from Micron. According to Micron, “Our 16nm NAND technology
Seagate Buys LSI Flash Business for $450 Million from Avago
So, its starting to get a bit confusing how many times SandForce has changed hands by this point, but the short of it is that they were bought by LSI in 2011 to beef up the company’s flash business, and then LSI as a whole was purchased by Avago last year which included the SandForce division. And now, Avago, a company mostly known for their components (not necessarily entire products) has sold the solid state flash business of LSI to Seagate to the tune of $450 million. This includes both LSI’s own line of PCIe based SSDs as well as their SSD controller business which produces
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
SanDisk Launches World's First 2.5" 4TB SSD
There is no denying that SSD capacities have been steadily increasing with each generation of NAND improvements and with newer and newer controllers. But the holy grail has always been how much capacity can you fit into a 2.5″ drive since that is the most commonly used form factor for more enterprise drives nowadays. As such, it was astonishing to hear that SanDisk was able to cram 4TB of solid state storage into a single 2.5″ drive, which supposedly isn’t the end of SanDisk’s innovation. The SanDisk Optimus MAX SAS SSDs are specifically designed to replace spinning 10k and 15k RPM 2.5″ HDDs and to do
Macbook Air Gets Refreshed, $899 for 11" and $999 for 13"
It isn’t often that Apple will update a piece of hardware without doing some kind of major launch or making a big deal about it. But with the new Macbook Air, they did just that. With the new Macbook Air (2014), Apple has made some minute improvements over the previous generation. Namely, Apple has kept the same Haswell chips in the Macbook Air from 2013, but has bumped the CPU clock to 1.4 GHz base from 1.3 GHz. This is probably due to a bin improvement on the chips themselves, which means faster chips at the same or lower power with almost no changes at all.
Samsung’s 24 SSD video reminds us of all the speed brakes
Samsung’s Marketing guys probably pulled a marketing stunt of the year, with a Youtube video which probably cost them less than any of those fancy ads in papers. Guys’n’girls took 24 Samsung 220/200MB Read/Write SSD drives, put’em on an RAID controller and tested them using a Skulltrail system. While achieved speed of 2GB/s was awesome, it also struck me as a pretty low figure for a 24 drive setup. Each drive achieved only 85MB/s, far cry from what those drives are capable of. Given that a RAID0 array with five Intel or OCZ SSDs gives out 1GB/s, why did Samsung need 19 more drives to
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
