Storage
Rounding out our Computex 2024 SSD controller news, let's talk about the final major controller vendor at the show: Silicon Motion. Silicon Motion has been somewhat late to the PCIe Gen5 SSD party, as its rival Phison has been offering their high-end PS5026-E26 controller for almost 18 months now. But as Silicon Motion gets ready to make the transition to PCIe 5.0, the company has a trump card up its sleeve: the SM2508 controller, an energy-efficient high-end SSD controller that is intended for lower-power drives. A PCIe Gen5 x4 controller, SMI's SM2508 boasts a very low active power consumption of 3.5W. Which, installed in an M.2 SSD, is intended to allow drive manufacturers to built 7 Watt (or lower) SSDs, according to the company. The...
Kingston's SSDNow V+200: More Affordable SandForce
Last year Kingston introduced its HyperX line of SF-2281 based SSDs. HyperX marked the first time SandForce and Kingston ever worked together but the relationship continued. Kingston quietly introduced...
13 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 1/19/2012Crucial Provides a Firmware Update for M4 to Fix The BSOD Issue
Last week, we wrote about the BSOD issue that Crucial's M4 SSDs were experiencing. After 5184 hours (yes, that's the specific number) of active use, the SSD started to...
15 by Kristian Vättö on 1/14/2012Some Thoughts on SandForce's 3rd Generation SSD Controller
I spent a few minutes talking to SandForce in between meetings today and got a general idea of what a third generation SF controller might look like. The SandForce...
14 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 1/12/2012Crucial 50GB Adrenaline SSD Cache, Available in Q1
Earlier this week Crucial announced its first SSD caching solution: the Adrenaline SSD. The drive will be available in a single capacity: 50GB with 64GB of 25nm MLC NAND...
15 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 1/11/2012Mushkin's 1.8", mSATA & PCIe SF-2281 SSDs at CES
The SSD market is continuing to grow and we're seeing no slowdown in the number of players trying to get in on the action. Mushkin, one of the first...
4 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 1/10/2012AppliedMicro's Catalina: Integrated USB 3.0 and 802.11ac Support for NAS Platforms
AppliedMicro (AMCC) announced the availability of the Catalina SoC (APM86491) for low power and cost effective NAS systems today. The previous generation version (APM82181) was the heart of the...
1 by Ganesh T S on 1/10/2012Seagate's GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapters
Finally, we're getting somewhere. After seeing nothing but Thunderbolt storage devices with built in, overpriced drives, Seagate is going to be delivering the first GoFlex docks with Thunderbolt support...
17 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 1/10/2012OCZ Scores an Ultrabook Design Win for Everest: LG Super Ultrabook Z300
OCZ is on a roll at CES this year. It just announced LG's Super Ultrabook Z300 will ship with a 256GB mSATA Indilinx Everest based SSD. I'm still trying...
4 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 1/9/2012OCZ Z-Drive R4 CloudServ (RM1616) Features Sixteen SandForce Controllers
The Z-Drive R4 is a PCIe SSD available in 4 and 8-controller versions targeted squarely at the enterprise. Apparently some of OCZ's customers wanted an even beefier version, which...
6 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 1/9/2012OCZ's 4TB 3.5" Chiron SSD
Take four Indilinx Everest controllers, put them behind custom OCZ FPGAs that implement its own VCA (RAID-like) architecture and you've got the Chiron. The complete enclosure provides support for...
9 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 1/9/2012OCZ's Portable Thunderbolt SSD: Lightfoot
I mentioned earlier that we'll be seeing more Thunderbolt devices at CES this year, but what I wasn't expecting was for one of those devices to be made by...
12 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 1/9/2012OCZ's Indilinx Everest 2 Launching in June 2012, Features Vastly Improved Random Performance
OCZ has a lot to show off this year at CES/Storage Visions, but the most exciting product from a client standpoint is its new Everest 2 controller. While the...
11 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 1/9/2012OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G 480GB SSD Upgrade for MacBook Air
OWC released a SandForce SF-2281 based 2011 MacBook Air SSD upgrade earlier this year in 120GB and 240GB capacities (the Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G). Using Hynix 2x-nm NAND...
5 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 1/8/2012LaCie at CES: 2big & eSATA Thunderbolt Hubs
We're expecting to see a lot of Thunderbolt devices at CES this year and we've already seen our first two new products, both from LaCie. The first is the...
2 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 1/8/2012Crucial to Fix M4 BSOD Issue in Two Weeks
Here we go again. Pretty much every SATA 6Gb/s SSD offering has experienced some issues and it appears the Crucial M4 is no exception. There have been threads about...
40 by Kristian Vättö on 1/6/2012OCZ & Marvell Create Native PCIe SSD Controller, Z-Drive R5 to Debut Next Week
Just a couple of months after launching its first SATA based SSD controller developed in-house, OCZ is announcing a PCIe based SSD controller co-developed with Marvell. The controller is...
22 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 1/6/2012OCZ Octane 128GB SSD Review
Earlier this year OCZ acquired Indilinx, one of the first SSD controller makers to really make a splash in the enthusiast community. Ever since OCZ entered the SSD business...
39 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 12/28/2011Apple Acquires Anobit: Bringing NAND Endurance Technology In-House
I'd seen speculation that Apple was going to drop $500M on Anobit over the past few weeks. Ars Technica also published a piece believing the acquisition to be true...
30 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 12/21/2011PogoPlug Series 4 Introduced; USB3.0 Meets The Cloud
PogoPlug has been making appearances in a number of products for a few years now. The premise is simple: take a low-power ARM computer, give it a NAS optimized...
24 by Jason Inofuentes on 12/14/2011Updated: OCZ's Petrol SSD: More Affordable Indilinx Everest
Last month OCZ introduced the Octane, its first SSD based on the now in-house Indilinx Everest controller. The drive did reasonably well in our tests and was priced competitively...
18 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 12/13/2011