Articles about SSD

When you are either building a desktop or upgrading a laptop, one of the first things you should focus on is the SSD. This drive will hold your precious data -- it is not the component where you should try and save money. Even if it costs a bit more, it is totally worth spending on a reliable brand.

For solid state drives, Samsung is one of the best such brands. While its drives can be a bit pricey, you get what you pay for. Today, that company announces that the budget-focused 750 EVO SSD is gaining a 500GB option to go along with 120GB and 250GB. Even better, the SATA drive is getting wider availability starting in June. Yes, the SSD is leaving the confines of emerging markets and heading to major ones, such as the USA, China, Europe, and Korea.

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If you are still using a SATA SSD, you probably think your drive is fast. Yeah, compared to an old-school mechanical hard drive it is. However, the future of computing is all about NVMe PCIe drives. These solid state drive variants break past the SATA barrier, delivering amazing performance that older SSDs can't match.

Today, Toshiba announces the ultra-fast OCZ RD400 NVMe PCIe SSD. This drive offers insane read and write speeds, making it a wise choice for both gamers and PC enthusiasts alike.

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Solid state drives are quite mature and ubiquitous nowadays -- the technology is no longer cutting edge. While some computers still ship with slow mechanical hard disk drives, SSDs are now largely the default option.

SATA based drives are slow compared to newer NVMe PCIe variants, but still more than fast enough for most consumers. These 2.5-inch SATA drives are often less expensive too, making them a wise option for OEMs looking to build low or medium-cost laptops. Now, SanDisk announces the Z410 -- a drop-in solution for manufacturers, featuring a capacity of up to 480GB.

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Until recently, hard disk drives prevailed as the dominant storage device on desktop computers, laptops, smartphones, tablets, servers, and data centers. But thanks to the drop in price for solid state drives (SSD), that has changed. SSDs are more popular among both individual users and businesses. But for all of the advantages, they also possess unique traits that present some difficulties in wiping data from them.

Unfortunately, knowledge of the proper solid state drive erasure methods has not been anywhere near as fast or as ubiquitous as the SSD adoption rate. So you will often see methods that are assumed to be reliable -- such as reformatting and factory resets -- being performed on solid state drives. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to properly erase data from SSDs -- it just means users need to understand all of the technical features, the key situations when data has to be absolutely erased and the most reliable data removal method that needs to be used.

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Flash storage has a bright future ahead, IT decision makers from the UK, US and France agree. According to a new research by Kaminario and Vanson Bourne, the adoption of flash storage, such as solid-state drives, will increase as the performance of these devices improves, and the prices drop.

The research also shows that currently, less than 50 percent of storage media is flash, suggesting that there is a lot of space for growth.

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It is becoming a cliché, but the best upgrade you can make is moving from a mechanical HDD to an SSD. In 2016, however, all solid state drives are not created equal. While it used to be that having any SSD was awesome, this is simply not the case anymore. As higher capacities become less expensive, and interfaces become speedier, that SATA SSD you bought a few years ago may not be so great anymore.

Case in point, today, Seagate shows off what it claims is the fastest SSD ever. How fast is it, you ask? 10 gigabytes per second! Yes, that is gigabytes, folks, and not gigabits. It utilizes a 16-lane NVMe PCIe interface. Oh. My. Gosh.

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The average contract price of mainstream PC-Client OEM SSDs in Q1 of 2016 has dropped, a new report by TrendForce’s DRAMeXchange suggests.

MLC-based SSDs, as well as their TLC-based counterparts have seen their prices drop 10-12 percent, and seven-12 percent respectively.

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Back in the 1990's, my first-ever computer came with a 4GB hard drive. At the time, this was absolutely massive -- my computer-literate friends told me I would never need a bigger drive in my lifetime. Obviously, this thinking was wrong -- 4GB is considered rather small for a flash drive nowadays. Heck, when it comes to technology, never believe anything is "good enough", or that things won't get better and faster.

Today, Samsung begins shipping an SSD that makes large HDDs looks worthless by comparison. You see, the PM1633a is the world's largest solid state drive, with a capacity of 15.36TB! No, you aren't dreaming -- this is real.

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While some people decry the use of cloud storage as unsafe, I love it. All of my important files get saved to Dropbox, so they are forever safe. With that said, I'm no dummy -- redundancy is key. I regularly mirror my online storage to a portable USB hard drive just in case. This is important for backup purposes, but it also helps me retain some control over my data.

Portable hard drives are great, as they can be connected to both desktops and laptops. Unfortunately, many of them are bulky and utilize mechanical HDDs, making them potentially slow, hot, or vulnerable to bumps and jitters. When Samsung introduced its Portable SSD T3 at CES 2016, I knew I wanted one to store my files. Today, this beautiful feat of engineering and design becomes available to consumers.

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When it comes to computers, thin is in. With every passing year, it seems laptops, tablets and other devices become more svelte. Some people decry this design direction, saying what we have is "thin enough", and yeah, I get that, but manufacturers should never become complacent. As long as the thin nature doesn't compromise the overall experience, I'm all for it.

Today, Transcend announces a super-thin 1TB M.2 SSD that is designed with a focus on Ultrabooks. Remember folks, PC manufacturers need to source thin and light components in order to keep pushing the envelope. A thin high-capacity drive such as this, while not super-fast, can definitely find a home in some future computers. This all-new 1TB variant joins the existing capacities of 32GB-512GB.

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If your desktop or laptop doesn't have an SSD, you are missing out on something wonderful. If you think your mechanical hard disk drive is "good enough", please know that a solid state upgrade can reduce noise, increase battery life, and most importantly, dramatically improve performance. Even if you are adverse to spending money, there are plenty of affordable drives nowadays.

Today, Toshiba announces a new series of SSD with the 'SG5' designation. These solid state drives have capacities up to 1TB and feature 15nm fabricated TLC nand chips. To meet the needs of most consumers, the drives will come in either 2.5 inch or M.2 form factors. Unfortunately, the drives -- including the M.2 variant -- utilize the SATA interface, so speeds will not be mind-blowing like a PCIe SSD.

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Intel’s SSDs may soon see a significant increase in their capacity and speed as a result of Micron’s latest chips, which could also be used to create competitive SSDs that are as small as flash drives.

Micron is responsible for producing the flash which is used in Intel’s SSDs and now it has begun manufacturing and distributing its 3D NAND flash in large quantities. The company’s 3D flash chips would allow tiny SSDs to reach a capacity of 3.5TB, and 2.5 inch SSDs could possibly hold even more than 10TB of storage.

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It seems as 2016 will be the year of the SSD (solid-state drive), with more and more IT decision makers saying they’re looking to use the advanced storage technology within their organizations.

This is according to a Spiceworks Voice of IT survey, done by Crucial, which asked 306 IT decision-makers in Europe and North America about their storage plans.

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Hey, bro -- ready to do some extreme sports? Yeah, me too. I'm about to do some naked skydiving and then surf during a hurricane. Of course, I will capture all of my gnarly adventures with my camera, so I can show-off how extreme my life is on social media, bro.

Obviously, I am joking, dear BetaNews readers. As you know by now, the most extreme I get is getting a venti blonde roast from Starbucks rather than a tall. Still, despite my boring life, I like rugged technology. This is especially true when it comes to backing up files. My family photos are precious to me -- the more durable the storage drive, the better. Today, Sandisk announces such a hardcore external drive -- the Extreme 510 Portable SSD.

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S.M.A.R.T. which stands for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology is a fantastic tool for anticipating hardware errors on hard disk drives. The utility can test for bad sectors and some software can even test for temperature, core speed and system fan speed anomalies. When S.M.A.R.T. software indicates an imminent hard drive failure, the user is notified so that data can be backed up and data loss avoided. Diagnostic programs are widely used on mechanical hard disk drives and RAID, but how reliable are they on solid state drives SSDs?

Checks include electrical and mechanical performance and read/write error rates. Electrical tests include RAM and read/write circuitry. Mechanical tests seek servo information on data tracks, scanning for bad sectors across the entire disk surface. However solid state drives are constructed very differently, although flash media does develop errors over time -- normally bad flash blocks in the NAND memory chips. Just like traditional hard disk drives, the controller manages these bad blocks and re-maps them to ‘extra’ blocks. Eventually the drive will run out of ‘extra’ blocks and S.M.A.R.T. is quick to identify this.

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