Storage

Gigabyte has been expanding their portfolio of products this year. With their high-end gaming brand AORUS they introduced both DDR4 memory and power supplies. Under the main brand they are releasing their first solid state drive, the UD Pro. With this move it seems Gigabyte pretty much makes everything you need to build a system besides the CPU of course. The UD Pro drive is powered by the Phison S10 controller and Toshiba 64-layer TLC NAND. It boats sequential read and write speeds of 530 MB/s and 500 MB/s respectively. Let's take a look at this drive and see what it can do!

When you think about NVMe solid state drives you typically think of high performance, high cost drives. Well Toshiba has a new class of NVMe drives in their OCZ RC100 series drives that will help bring NVMe drives into the mainstream. These new affordable NVMe drives have a DRAM-less design, but make use of Host Memory Buffer (HMB) which accesses the system DRAM for its own caching space. The drives also make use of a PCIe Gen 3 x2 interface (whereas most NVMe drives use an x4 interface). With that you have sequential read and write speeds of 1600 MB/s and 1050 MB/s respectively. While this speed is not on the level of high-end NVMe drives it is definitely faster than a normal SATA-based solid state drives and much, much faster than a traditional hard drive. Can this be the drive to bring NVMe speeds to the mainstream? Read on as we find out!

This past year we saw the introduction of many USB 3.1 solid state drives. These became extremely popular and are great for portable game drives, video and photo editing drives, and more because of their size and speed. This year we are going to see the introduction of many Thunderbolt 3 portable solid state drives. This gives you the ability to take advantage of the 40Gbps speed of Thunderbolt 3, which is three times faster than USB 3.1 (10Gbps). Patriot was one of the first to announce a Thunderbolt 3 portable solid state drive in their EVLVR. Today we are checking out the 1TB version of the drive, which boasts speeds of 1600 MB/s read and 1000 MB/s write. Let's take a look at this drive and see if it sets a new standard for portable solid state drives.

Solid State drive pricing keeps on getting lower and lower, but we still see 2.5-inch drives distinguished into three segments, entry-level, mainstream, and high performance. New entry-level drives more than likely do not have a DRAM chip for caching. That is the case with the Mushkin Source, which sits at the bottom of Mushkin's solid state drive product stack. This drive is powered by the Silicon Motion SM2258XT controller teamed with Micron 3D TLC NAND. Mushkin tells us this combination boats sequential read and write speeds of 560 MB/s and 520 MB/s respectively. The 500GB version we are checking out today <a href="https://amzn.to/2Ln5tfR" rel="noopener" target="_blank">sells for only $89.99</a>! Let's jump in and see what it can do!

QSAN's XCubeNAS XN5000T series of NAS units are designed for the workloads of both workgroups and SMB environments. Given that direction, you won't find a plethora of consumer-oriented applications like multimedia transcoding, media servers, or the like. Instead, the XN5004T we are reviewing today offers a solid base of tools and features for getting work done in an efficient and reliable manner.

We took a look at ADATA's first NVMe solid state drive the XPG SX8000 back in early 2017. Needless to say it was not the best NVMe drive we tested at the time. Well today we have one of their newest drives the XPG SX8200. It makes use of Silicon Motion's SM2262 controller paired with Micron's 64-layer 3D TLC NAND. It seems like ADATA has got things right with this drive as both the controller and the NAND are some of the best currently available. ADATA puts specifications of this drive at 3200 MB/s read and 1700 MB/s write, so it is definitely an improvement over the previous generation. The drive is also backed by a 5-year warranty. Let's put this drive to the test and see what it can do!

Synology, a tried and true provider of NAS, networking, and surveillance products, recently released the DiskStation DS1618+, a NAS aimed at providing both home and small-to-medium sized businesses with a scalable storage solution. Offering room for up to six drives, and the ability to upgrade to a 10Gbps NIC or M.2 SSD caching, the DiskStation DS1618+ looks to be a powerhouse system.

Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices have definitely evolved over the past few years. Yes they are there to give you a reliable data backup for your files, with easy access to these files over the network, or even over the internet. But many consumers are looking for a device to store, and more importantly be able to stream media to all of the different devices in their home. Synology's DiskStation DS418play allows you to not only stream HD video content to these devices, but 4K content as well. It does all of the heavy lifting, transcoding this content so even the smallest, under-powered devices can be streamed to. Being a Synology NAS the DiskStation DS418play is also loaded with Synology's DSM which gives you access to all types of tools for home and small business use. Let's get some drives in the DS418play and see what it can do!

High performance portable storage is becoming more affordable and rightfully so. Being someone who works with 4K video having fast portable storage is important. Not only when I am traveling, but when I want to transfer files between two different machines. SanDisk's latest Extreme Portable SSD gives you up to a 1TB capacity, rugged design with an IP55 rating, and read and write speeds of 550 MB/s and 500 MB/s respectively. Could this be the best portable solid state drive we've seen? Read on as we find out!

Western Digital is a still is a major player in the storage market, but when it comes to solid state drives WD has not really broken into the gaming and enthusiast market that well. Their current solid state drive offering was late to the game by all accounts and was not all that impressive given what else is out there. Being late to the game and not having those high-performance parts that gamers and enthusiasts want has made way for other companies (specifically Samsung) to dominate this market. Well today Western Digital is releasing a high-performance NVMe SSD that is targeted directly at gamers. It is the WD Black NVMe SSD, which has been built completely in house by Western Digital and boasts read and write speeds of 3400 MB/s and 2800 MB/s respectively. Is this the new must-have NVMe SSD for gamers and enthusiasts? Read on as we find out...