Samsung’s 860 SSDs, in ‘black slab’ 2.5in SATA housings, have become a popular choice for PC builds. The 970 replaces a different animal, the 960 family of NVMe drives, made for the M.2 slots on recent motherboards. As such, it comes as a small printed circuit board (PCB) and promises much faster operation. We’ve seen … Read more
Crucial MX500 500GB review – THE MARCH OF TECHNOLOGY waits for no man. Unless the poor sap in question relies upon the SATA interface for his PC storage connectivity. In which case, technology is happy to sit down and soak up the view. That’s because of the limitations associated with SATA. First, there’s a hard bandwidth … Read more
Samsung 860 EVO review – The 860 EVO performs as well, or better than, most MLC-NAND SSDs we’ve tested. by jon l. jacobi The Samsung 860 EVO has convinced us: It is now safe to equate TLC (Triple-Level-Cell) SSDs with top-notch SATA performance. TLC-NAND SSDs used to be more about affordability, but the 860 EVO … Read more
SSD volumes are fast and efficient, but how do you ensure you’re getting the most from them? Aaron investigates Solid State Drives have been around for some time now and, while the tech is still very expensive compared to traditional (mechanical) drives, more and more people are living with the smaller capacities they offer in … Read more
Head to head: Hard drive technologies – Jeremy Laird pits the magnetic hard drive against SATA SSD and M.2 NVMe technologies in a head-to-head battle to discover which one is superior. Storage was once the final frontier of PC performance, and the last component to become fully solid state. [wpsm_toplist] Today, the latest M.2 SSDs powered … Read more
Seagate FireCuda 2TB Review – Seagate’s FireCuda range is the last hurrah of hybrid desktop hard drives that combine a traditional hard drive with a small SSD. While they’re still a viable option for laptops where there’s sometimes only room for one drive, they’ve failed to take off in the desktop PC space, as the lack … Read more
The Transcend MTS400 is a remarkably compact SSD, which comes in four different capacities: 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and the 256GB one we’re reviewing in this instance. It weighs around 4g and measures just 22 x 42 x 3.5mm, roughly half the length of the previous ‘gumstick’ M.2 SSDs we’ve looked at. The power consumption is … Read more
At the edge of the final storage frontier, the universe’s greatest storage system is about to unfold WE ALL KNOW SSDS are coming to kill old spinning storage, but for many of us, a bank of HDDs still offers the capacity we need—8K footage, a mass of multi-megabyte photos, and who knows what other encyclopedic-level … Read more
Mark Pickavance talks about some clever methods to add an SSD to a laptop that potentially wasn’t designed to take one. Very often upgrades deliver only modest improvements in performance, where benchmarks are usually needed to appreciate the effect. One of the exceptions to this is SSD drives, as they outperform their mechanical drive counterparts … Read more
Samsung 850 EVO 500GB Review – For four years now, Samsung’s 850 Evo has reigned supreme as the go-to SSD for anyone seeking the ideal balance between performance and price. Thanks to Samsung being the first company to market with its cost-effective 3D NAND, it was able to keep the cost of its drives low. Meanwhile, … Read more
Up to this point, M.2 SSDs have tended to be in one of two categories: expensive NVMe models or cheaper SATA ones. The WD Blue SN500, though, is a genuine halfway house. It offers a meaningful upgrade over SATA drives but is only a little more expensive. This 500GB version offers sequential read speeds of up … Read more
Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB The best just got better staying at the top is often tougher than getting there. Maybe that’s why Samsung is revising its mainstream 970 Evo M.2 SSD less than a year after it went on sale. Whatever, we give you the Samsung 970 Evo Plus, in all its 96-layer glory. The … Read more