Transcend

We have our first retail SSD with JMicron's JMF667H controller. Paying $115 for 256 GB of fast storage sure sounds attractive, but has the company ironed out the issues that plagued it in the early days of SSDs? We run its SSD340 through our grinder.

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.

Another trio of SuperSpeed USB 3.0 drives landed in our German lab recently. As some of the contenders we've benchmarked underperform compared to our expectations, it’s quite clear that hard drive speed matters again, now that we've moved beyond USB 2.0.

Professionals rely on high-speed CompactFlash cards. Today we're looking at a handful of different options from Lexar, Samsung, SanDisk, Silicon Power, and Transcend with capacities up to 64GB and speeds up to 600x (as high as 90 MB/s)

Most of the elite SDHC memory cards we've reviewed are “Class 6” rated, a label that promises high performance. However, we found significant performance differences among them.