Storage

Written By: Joe Evans @ Legit Reviews

Ever since OCZ decided to solely focus on their SSD products, their drive offerings have leaned towards workstation and enthusiast level drives which has left somewhat of a gap in their entry-level or value oriented product line. Given the lower margins for such products and OCZ’s financial struggles (prior to the Toshiba buyout), it’s not very surprising. Their competitors have aggressively pursued this market segment however, and we’ve seen some very economically priced drives from Crucial/Micron, Samsung, SanDisk and others. This is an important demographic as it can be the gateway to building brand loyalty and win over customers who will potentially upgrade to a more performance oriented drive later on. To plug that hole, OCZ is releasing the ARC 100 drive which is aimed squarely at the entry level SSD market, although this doesn’t mean they’ve compromised on performance for the sake of price. They’ve equipped it with their Indilinx Barefoot M10 controller which we know to be a very solid part.

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By Kristian Vättö @ AnandTech

A couple of months ago we reviewed JMicron’s JMF667H reference design SSDs, which did relatively well in our tests especially when taking JMicron’s previous SSD controllers into account. As always, reference designs are only meant for evaluation and do not make their way into retail, so today we are taking a look at Transcend’s SSD340.

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By Marco Chiappetta @ HotHardware

In the past few weeks, we’ve seen a steady stream of new solid state drive releases, from the likes of Plextor, Crucial, and SanDisk. Our review of the Plextor M6M mSATA drive can be found here, and we covered Crucial’s MX100 series here. And reviews of some new SanDisk drives are currently in the works. Today, however, Samsung is unveiling something new we think you’ll really take interest in.

Up next for your reading pleasure, we have Samsung’s brand-new SSD 850 PRO series. The 128GB and 1TB Samsung SSD 850 PRO drives we’ll be showing you here are the company’s latest flagship solid state drives, targeted at client applications. Like the previously-released SSD 845 EVO series, the 850 PRO leverages Samsung’s MEX controller, but these drives are also packing bleeding-edge 32 layer, stacked, 3D V-NAND flash memory that purportedly offers better power, endurance, and performance than traditional MLC NAND.

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