This is officially the first consumer solid state drive from OCZ that is using the new Barefoot 3 controller. This new controller is designed completely in-house by OCZ. OCZ is touting this new drive as the standard for performance users and it offers sequential read and write speeds of 550MB/s and 530MB/s respectively. The Vector is available in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB versions and OCZ is backing it with a 5 year warranty. Will this be the drive that saves OCZ and puts them back on track or is the the last ditch effort of a dying company? Time will only tell.
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Mini-SATA or mSATA as most people call it was announced towards the end of 2009. It has primarily been used in laptops and netbooks where a very small solid state drive has been needed. Recently with Intel Z77 chipset we have seen many mSATA ports show up on motherboards. Today we get our first look at an mSATA solid state drive, and man is it small! The drive in question today is the Crucial M4 mSATA 256GB drive. Read on to check out our unboxing and overview video!
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We all know OCZ as one of the top names in the SSD market. Believe it or not just a few years ago their main focus was enthusiast memory! The popular 3rd party solid state drive controller that everyone has been using over the past year or so has been the SandForce SF-2281 chip. Because so many companies are using the same controller the solid state drive market has become saturated with the same type of drives that offer just about the same performance. OCZ wants to remain a big player in the solid state drive market and with their purchase of Indilinx last year they made that very apparent. Earlier this year OCZ announced the second generation Everest solid state drive controller (Everest 2) and the Vertex 4 is the first consumer drive to use this controller. With rated speeds of 560MB/s read and 510MB/s write it is set to compete very well with SandForce-based drives. Read on as we check out this new drive from OCZ!
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OCZ’s latest solid state drive is the Vertex 4 and unlike many of the solid state drive we have seen this year it is not powered by the SandForce SF-2281 controller. Instead it is using the Indilinx Everest 2 platform. The Vertex 4 is the first consumer drive to use the Everest 2 platform and boasts speeds of 560MB/s read and 510MB/s write! It is definitely set to compete with SandForce drives! Read on to check out our unboxing video where we give you an overview of the drive and open it up so you can get a closer look at the Everest 2 platform!
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The Crucial M4 solid state drive was one of the most popular and most successful solid state drives of 2011. Much of that success can be attributed to Crucial’s reputation for reliable, quality-made products and because they are one of the largest memory producers out there. When the M4 first came out it only had a rated read speed of 415MB/s, which is pretty far off from what we’ve seen from other solid state drives in 2011. Towards the end of 2011 Crucial released a firmware upgrade that boosted the rated speeds to 500MB/s read and 260MB/s write. A nice improvement! So today we have the M4 in our labs and we will be taking it through the paces.
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Crucial is one company we have not seen a solid state drive from in some time. Well they have a new SATA 6GB/s solid state drive in their Marvell-based M4 drive. This drive has read speeds of up to 500MB/s and write speeds of up to 260MB/s. We just received the M4 256GB model and we are going to open it up and show you how it comes and take it apart to show you how it is built. Read on to check out our unboxing and overview video!
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Over the past year we have looked at quite a number of solid state drives. The surprising thing is that these drives have been from companies that are not known for storage products. They have mainly been from memory companies like OCZ, Corsair and Crucial. It is about time one of the big storage companies we all know stepped up and released a solid state drive. Well today we have one such drive from Western Digital. Today we will be taking a look at the SiliconEdge Blue 256GB solid state drive. This drive features read speeds of up to 250MB/s and write speeds of up to 170MB/s. Let’s take a look…
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Up until this point the solid state drives we have looked at have been limited to the SATA 3Gbps standard. While solid state drives are still much faster than normal hard drives we haven’t been able to really push them to their limits. There is where SATA 6Gbps comes in; basically you are getting 2X the speed of SATA 3Gbps. We have already seen ASUS and Gigabyte make SATA 6Gbps standard on some of their motherboards and I’m sure others will follow. Crucial is the first to come out with a SATA 6Gbps solid state drive. The drive is the C300 and it features the new Marvell 88SS9174-BJP2 Solid State Drive controller and boasts speeds of 355MB/s read and 215MB/s write. This drive also is one of the first to use ONFI 2.1 synchronous NAND flash. Read on as we test one of the fastest solid state hard drives available!
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When it comes to Solid State Drives (SSD’s), it seems like many of the offerings available are from companies known for memory, not storage. This is because unlike traditional hard drives SSD’s have no moving parts and use NAND memory chips. So you would expect a company like Crucial to have a line of SSD drives, and they do! Actually our first SSD review here at ThinkComputers was a Crucial Drive. Today we will be looking at the 256GB M225 Solid State drive that is based off the ever popular Indilinx Barefoot controller. Let’s take a look…
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