When a very fast drive just isn’t fast enough for you Samsung 950 Pro M.2 PCIe 256GB Review – The day that the Samsung 950 Pro arrived, I noticed that one online retailer was selling a 240GB OCZ Trion 100 for less than £50. Given the price of the 256GB version of the Samsung 950 Pro, … Read more
It feels like an age since we’ve had a Plextor drive in for testing. Last year, the company released a slew of its M6 model drives, covering standard SSD and mSATA. The 256GB M6M in particular is one of the more recent of the M6 drives, although it too is over a year old now. … Read more
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
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
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 makes some scorching hot hardware, but not in the Galaxy Note 7 way Dо you recall when the PC transitioned from IDE to SATA? Then most motherboards came with both ports, and I recall looking at IDE and wondering why they still existed. SATA was so superior that, other than for legacy reasons, IDE … Read more
When solid-state drives first arrived, there was much rejoicing. Surely, the PC had crossed the final frontier. All mechanical devices could finally be banished, and with them any performance bottlenecks. The PC’s work was done. But it hasn’t quite worked out like that. The first consumer SSDs had some serious performance flaws. Once those were … Read more
Last issue we Looked at Samsung’s new 960 Pro drives and concluded they were amazingly fast, but overkill for most people, especially for the price. However, Samsung’s new 960 Evo looks set to provide very similar performance for a far more sensible price. Like the 960 Pro drives, the Evo drives are M.2 NVMe drives, … Read more
Samsung’s 850 series SSDs has been a popular choice for some time and comes in a 2.5in hard drive-sized format to plug into the SATA connectors found in most desktop PCs. When the 950 arrived last year, it was more of a niche product. It used the stripped-down M.2 format – a small printed circuit … Read more
Intel Optane SSD 800p 118GB – 3D XPoint memory hits the mainstream. Ten times the data density, 1,000 times faster, 1,000 times better endurance. All of this and more Intel claimed three years ago for its revolutionary 3D XPoint non-volatile memory tech, now branded Optane. Those claims were made in comparison to the nonvolatile memory tech that … Read more
SanDisk X400 128GB Review • Requirements: M.2, SATA 6Gbps connection on your motherboard Our third M.2 SSD is the entry-level model from the SanDisk X400 range, which includes capacities from 128GB up to an impressive 1TB in both M.2 and standard 2.5″ forms. This multi-layer TLC NAND (single-sided) memory device features a Marvell 88SS1074-BSW2 controller and … Read more
Samsung 960 Evo 250GB – Proof that a smaller cache comes at a cost. Samsung’s premium Pro drives are pretty much the go-to SSDs for enthusiasts seeking the best in solid-state storage performance. The latest 960 Pro is a barnstormer of an SSD. But it ain’t cheap. In 512GB M.2 configuration — the smallest option. … Read more