SSD

Seagate is the world's largest purveyor of mechanical hard drives. As the company prepares for mortal combat in the consumer SSD space, are its wits, Toshiba's Toggle-mode NAND, and SK hynix memory solutions' 87800 controller enough to get by?

After years of halfhearted attempts to join the solid-state storage market, Seagate is finally ready to reinvent itself with a new family of SSDs. The first one we're looking at is the enterprise-class 600 Pro. Does this 200 GB drive impress our team?

Today's fastest SSDs already bounce off the SATA 6Gb/s interface's throughput ceiling. Does a 3 Gb/s link kill the performance of those drives? We run a number of synthetic and real-world tests to assess the damage when you upgrade an older platform.

We've already reviewed Intel's SSD DC S3700 and determined it to be a fast, consistent performer. But what happens when we take two-dozen (or about $50,000) worth of them and create a massive RAID 0 array? Come along as we play around in storage heaven.

Endurance. Reliability. Data protection. They're all important factors when it comes time to evaluate high-end storage technology. Micron's P400m, the company's latest enterprise-class SSD, is positioned to not only address those needs, but exceed them.

With the recent announcement of the SSD DC S3700, Intel is firmly targeting enterprise customers with something not normally seen on spec sheets: performance consistency. Will their latest offering live up to expectations, or fall short? Lets find out.

The first mSATA-based SSDs we reviewed wowed us with diminutive dimensions, but not as much with performance. Today's best efforts are a lot more like their desktop equivalents, though. We round up 10 models between 64 and 256 GB and nail down a winner.

Announced earlier this year, Micron's RealSSD P320h PCI Express-based SSD promises to be an enterprise workhorse. A custom controller, single-level cell NAND, amazingly low latency, stellar random I/O, and incredible endurance combine to blow us away.

Less than two years after acquiring Indilinx for $32 million in stock, OCZ is ready to introduce its first SSD based on controller technology developed in-house. Can its new Barefoot 3 propel the 256 GB Vector we're testing into a performance victory?

Over the past year, we've seen the cost per gigabyte of solid-state storage drop in a major way. Once upon a time, we shopped for affordable 60 and 80 GB drives. Now we really want 256 GB drives in our desktops. Meet the last 10 models to land in our lab.

Intel's SSD 335 is a refresh of the SSD 330 sporting 20 nm MLC NAND flash. Does it alter performance? Not really. Pricing? Yes. How about endurance? That's hard to say for certain. There's only one model, though, with 240 GB of capacity. We test it today.

Hot on the heels of its M5S, Plextor sent us the M5 Pro. Loaded with hot new technologies like 19 nm NAND and the latest Marvell controller, the company's flagship was certainly worth waiting for. How does it do against the established incumbents, though?

Samsung is taking the wraps off its new flagship 840 Pro SSD. It's promising better performance, lower power consumption, a five-year warranty, and aggressive pricing. Is such a compelling combination of benefits really possible in such a crowded market?

Plextor's optical drives were always known for their quality. Now, the company is trying to carry that reputation over to SSDs. Its M5S is actually a fourth-generation offering based on Marvell's controller technology. But Plextor adds its own spin, too.

SSDs serve up data quickly, and prices are low enough that some enthusiasts may want SSDs for data storage. Does the file system you use matter? We compare performance between FAT32, NTFS, and the newer exFAT file systems on two popular SSD architectures.

It's easy to forget that lower-capacity SSDs are also usually slower. Today we're testing the most prolific 60/64 GB configurations to gauge where they fall in the big picture. We emerge at the other end with a recommendation based on our testing, too.

Flash-based solid-state drives with more than 64 or 128 GB of capacity are fairly small, but they're still really expensive relative to hard drives. Compressing the Windows partition frees up some space, but is that really a good idea?

Should you buy a new processor for your next machine? How about a new graphics card? Have you given any thought to the status of your storage subsystem? We're making a case for incorporating solid-state technology the next time you're upgrade-shopping.

Samsung's 830 is a late entry to the 6 Gb/s SSD market, but the company claims impressive performance. Can it unseat the incumbent SandForce-based drives? Let's just say this new offering shakes up the SSD world in a major way. Other vendors, beware.