SSD Ranking: The Fastest Solid State Drives
[Feb. 2012 update] Want to remove the speed limit on your PC? How about revving up the transfers and reads on your servers? Here’s the list of the fastest SSDs around at the time of this writing.
Archive for Articles
OCZ to Launch SSDs with TLC NAND, Slashing Price, Durability
OCZ aquired the SSD controller manufacturer Indilinx earlier this year–perhaps in a bid to loosen its ties to SandForce while increasing the prifit margins at the same time. In any event, the first product bearing the “Indilinx Infused” tagline, the OCZ Octane, was recently announced. Among other things, the new and improved Indilinx controller is [...]
SSD Health Checker
If you are curious as to how long your SSD will work correctly, you may want to have a look at SSDLife–a fun and potentially useful tool that fetches the S.M.A.R.T status and some other variables and also gives you something like a “death clock” for your drive. It’s hardly an exact science, but it’s [...]
Crucial m4 Firmware Update to 0009
Micron and its consumer brand Crucial is now releasing a new firmware for the M4 SSDs, which is more than welcome news for your humble SSD correspondent who is currently struggling to review this particular drive but have run into problems with hardware incompatibility issues and occasional startup freezes. The new firmware makes a few [...]
SSD Accelerator Feature Added to iolo System Mechanic 10.5
There are countless “system speed-up/tune-up/cleaning” tools available that perform maintenance tasks like registry cleaning, secure file removal, defragmentation and so on. Some of them are relatively useless and/or redundant (if not downright harmful) , but iolo’s System Mechanic software suite has been consistently popular through the years and has received quite a few good reviews [...]
PCM-based Storage – A Game Changer?
It looks like the ubiquitous NAND Flash memory is about to get some serious competition in the near future from Phase Change Memory (PCM), according to researchers from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). They have built PCIe SSD prototypes called Moneta and Onyx based on PCM modules that delivers truly astonishing performance compared [...]
Intel 510 Series SSDs Doubles Performance – Stays at 34nm
Intel’s new drives utilize the latest SATA specification and doubles performance compared with the manufacturer’s previous drives. The new 2.5-inch 510-series SSDs offers a clear step up in performance by taking advantage of the increased speeds of the SATA 3 interface, but is it enough to compete with the latest offerings from SandForce? In a [...]
Sandforce SF-2200 and SF-2100 Break New Performance Barriers
SandForce has taken a leading role in the field of SSD controllers and appears to extend it with the company’s new SF-2200 and SF-2100 processors. Out of these two the SF-2200 is particularly impressive, offering 500MB/s read AND write speeds over SATA 3, as well as 60,000 IOPS in 4K random reads. These chips will [...]
Micron Comments on Next-Gen SSDs and Dishonest Marketing Tactics
With CPUs, GPUs and motherboard chipsets, a smaller production process (measured in nanometers) is always seen as a sign of improvement in both efficiency and performance. With NAND flash memory, not so much. They actually wear down faster than their predecessors, which raises some questions about how the new drives are being marketed. Micron is [...]
Next-Gen Intel SSDs Ready for March Release (X25-M G3, 320 Series)
The rumor mill has indicated a February release for the next-generation MLC SSDs from Intel, i.e., the X-25 G3, but some additional information has surfaced that point to a March release. Most of the improvements are already known, but a reseller spreadsheet from the German site ComputerBase adds some more details to the mix, including [...]
