Although OCZ was first on the market with a USB 3.0 enabled SSD with its Enyo drive, competitors are knocking down the doors and bridging the gap. We saw the first lower cost USB 3.0 SSD with Kingston's DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0, however the JMicron JMF612 controller it was based on didn't really impress. The only thing the DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 had going for it was a lower total cost for the smaller capacity versions.

Hot on the heels of the release of its unusually potent V+100 SSD, Kingston aims its sights at the high end with its second USB 3.0 SSD: the HyperX MAX 3.0. Borrowing a brand from Kingston's enthusiast memory line, the HyperX MAX 3.0 is literally a SSDNow V+100 SSD paired with a SATA to USB 3.0 bridge PCB. 

Read on for a quick look at the drive's performance and behavior over time.

Last year was dominated by two SSD controller manufacturers: Intel and Indilinx. Intel delivered the performance while Indilinx offered a value alternative. Once SandForce hit early this year however, it was game over for Indilinx. We have reviewed a couple of Indilinx drives since SandForce hit but for the most part we've been enamored with SF and Crucial's offerings.

Over the summer Indilinx was supposed to have its next-generation controller ready for debut, codenamed Jet Stream. Unfortunately the 6Gbps controller has been delayed until 2011, leaving Indilinx with two options: quietly bow out of the SSD market, or update Barefoot.

And here we have the updated Barefoot:

The Indilinx Martini based OCZ Vertex Plus

Read on for our preview of the first new Indilinx controller since 2009.

I'm not sure what it is about SSD manufacturers and overly complicated product stacks. Kingston has no less than six different SSD brands in its lineup. The E Series, M Series, SSDNow V 100, SSDNow V+ 100, SSDNow V+ 100E and SSDNow V+ 180. The E and M series are just rebranded Intel drives, these use Intel's X25-E and X25-M G2 controllers respectively with Kingston logo on the enclosure. The SSDNow V 100 is an update to the SSDNow V Series drives, both of which use the JMicron JMF618 controller. Don't get this confused with the 30GB SSDNow V Series Boot Drive which actually uses a Toshiba T6UG1XBG controller, also used in the SSDNow V+. Confused yet? It gets better.

The standard V+ is gone and replaced by the new V+ 100, which is what we're here to take a look at today. This drive uses the T6UG1XBG controller but with updated firmware. The new firmware enables two things: very aggressive OS-independent garbage collection and higher overall performance. The former is very important as this is the same controller used in Apple's new MacBook Air. In fact, the performance of the Kingston V+100 drive mimics that of Apple's new SSDs.

Read on for our full review.

Over the summer we previewed OCZ's first affordable PCIe SSD: the RevoDrive. Made of a pair of SandForce SF-1200 controllers behind a PCI-X RAID controller and a PCI-X to PCIe bridge, the RevoDrive performed well and ended up being only slightly more expensive than a pair of SF-1200 SSDs. 

The original RevoDrive had an expansion connector on it that was never used. That's where the RevoDrive x2 comes in. You get twice the number of controllers, making the x2 identical in performance to OCZ's recently announced IBIS drive. But without the HSDL interface. Read on for our quick look at OCZ's latest PCIe SSD.

Two months ago I looked at the world’s first 3TB desktop hard drive. It was a 5 platter, 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT inside an external GoFlex Desk chassis. The performance of the drive wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but the poorly ventilated chassis seemed ill equipped to deal with the thermal load a 5-platter, 7200RPM 3TB drive would throw at it. I wasn’t terribly pleased and I wondered if Western Digital’s external enclosure might be better suited for heat dissipation. WD’s 3.5” external drives fall under the My Book brand and they have visibly more ventilation than the GoFlex Desk I reviewed.

As luck would have it, last week Western Digital announced its own 3TB external drive: the My Book Essential. The Essential suffix somehow implies USB 3.0 support.

Today, Western Digital takes it one step further and announces availability of the internal drive as well. The Caviar Green line is now home to a 2.5TB and a 3.0TB model, priced at $189 and $239 respectively.

Let’s go ahead and review both shall we?

If you’ve got more than one PC in the home, having a network drive to share files, stream media and create backups can make a lot of sense. Seagate released the GoFlex Home series of NAS drives a couple of months ago, aimed at those of us who need copious amounts of storage, easy setup with simple user access and control features.  We were sent the the 2TB GoFlex Home, and have had it on a network for a couple of weeks now, finding that there’s plenty to like and also a few things that could be improved...

For months SandForce has been telling me that the market is really going to get exciting once its next-generation controller is ready. I didn’t really believe it, simply because that’s what every company tells me. But in this case, at least based on what SandForce showed me, I probably should have.

What we have today are the official specs of the second-generation SandForce SSDs, the SF-2000 series. Drives will be sampling to enterprise customers in the coming weeks, but we probably won’t see shipping hardware until Q1 2011 if everything goes according to plan. And the specs are astounding.

Read on for our analysis.

What's this? The long awaited specs for Intel's third generation SSD? Indeed.

Internally it’s called the Postville Refresh (the X25-M G2 carried the Postville codename), but externally it carries the same X25-M brand we’ve seen since 2008. The new drive uses 25nm IMFT Flash, which means we should get roughly twice the capacity at the same price. While Intel is sampling 25nm MLC NAND today it's unclear whether or not we'll see drives available this year. I've heard that there's still a lot of tuning that needs to be done on the 25nm process before we get to production quality NAND. The third generation drives will be available somewhere in the Q4 2010 - Q1 2011 timeframe in capacities ranging from 40GB (X25-V) all the way up to 600GB.

Read on for the full specs!

Earlier this year OCZ announced its intention to bring a new high speed SSD interface to the market. Frustrated with the slow progress of SATA interface speeds, OCZ wanted to introduce an interface that would allow greater performance scaling today. Dubbed the High Speed Data Link (HSDL), OCZ’s new interface delivers 2 - 4GB/s (that’s right, gigabytes) of bi-directional bandwidth to a single SSD. It’s an absolutely absurd amount of bandwidth, definitely more than a single controller can feed today - which is why the first SSD to support it will be a multi-controller device with internal RAID.

Instead of relying on a SATA controller on your motherboard, HSDL SSDs feature a 4-lane PCIe SATA controller on the drive itself. HSDL is essentially a PCIe cable standard that uses a standard SAS cable to carry a 4 PCIe lanes between a SSD and your motherboard. On the system side you’ll just need a dumb card with some amount of logic to grab the cable and fan the signals out to a PCIe slot.

The first SSD to use HDSL is the OCZ IBIS. As the spiritual successor to the Colossus, the IBIS incorporates four SandForce SF-1200 controllers in a single 3.5” chassis. And it's fast. We've measured speeds at up to 800MB/s for a single IBIS and OCZ wants to eventually enable configurations of four IBIS drives. Read on for our full review of the IBIS drive and its technology.

Since I reviewed my first SSD, three things have happened. 1) Controllers have improved significantly. My personal favorite, SandForce’s SF-1200, can outperform the original X25-M by more than 3x in random write speed. 2) Consumer capacities have tripled. While the majority of SSDs sold are still under 100GB in size, you can now get 240GB and even 480GB consumer drives. 3) Prices have dropped. The first SSD I reviewed was Intel’s 80GB X25-M and it carried a $595 MSRP. OCZ will sell you a 120GB Vertex 2 for about half that today.

As a result of prices dropping, SSDs are being used for more than just expensive boot/application drives. Personally, I use a couple of old SSDs connected to Apricorn SATA-to-USB adapters as Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 install discs. Using an SSD instead of a DVD drive speeds up OS install time considerably. I can install Windows 7 from one of these SSDs to an SSD in just under 3 minutes (timed from the moment it starts installing to the first reboot).

OCZ was the first to produce an interesting SSD for external use but Kingston has since delivered a lower priced alternative. Read on as we look at both options.

Seagate recently announced the world's first 3TB 3.5" HDD. There's just one catch: it's external only. The FreeAgent GoFlex Desk 3TB arrived in our labs over a week ago and we've put in a lot of hours testing this thing. Not only did we try it as an external drive but we cracked open the case and played around with it as an internal SATA drive to explore breaking the 2TB limit on present day PCs.

Read on for our full review!

Buying an SSD for your notebook or desktop is nice. You get more consistent performance. Applications launch extremely fast. And if you choose the right SSD, you really curb the painful slowdown of your PC over time. I’ve argued that an SSD is the single best upgrade you can do for your computer, and I still believe that to be the case. However, at the end of the day, it’s a luxury item. It’s like saying that buying a Ferrari will help you accelerate quicker. That may be true, but it’s not necessary.

In the enterprise world however, SSDs are even more important. As we've shown in the past, a single enterprise SSD can replace several 15,000 RPM mechanical drives. You get better performance, much lower power consumption, and if you choose your drive well, more predictable reliability. From the manufacturer's perspective, the enterprise SSD market is more lucrative as cost is less of an issue.

Earlier this year Micron released its RealSSD C300, a consumer MLC drive. Today Micron is announcing the enterprise version of the drive: the RealSSD P300. We dive into the announcement to see what Micron has changed to address this market. Read on.

The promise was high. Crucial was to not only offer better than X25-M performance but also be the first to deliver a 6Gbps SSD. Competing controller makers wouldn't hit 6Gbps until Q3/Q4 at the earliest. Two things stood in Crucial's way: 1) a little company called SandForce and, 2) a pesky set of firmware issues.

With the latter taken care of, and the former dropping prices to be more aggressive in the market, it's about time that we gave Crucial's C300 SSD a good look.

Take two SandForce SF-1200 controllers and put them on a card with a boatload of NAND and a RAID controller. Add some special sauce to keep the price low and you have OCZ's RevoDrive. It'll offer up to twice the performance of a Vertex 2 SSD for only $20 more when it ships in July.

Read on to find out how OCZ did it and how the PCIe SSD stacks up against the best of the best.

Two years ago the best SSD you could buy was made by Intel and it cost $7.44 per GB of MLC NAND. Today Intel is actually the value leader. The 80GB X25-M G2 will set you back $205 at Newegg, or $2.56 per GB. The performance crown now belongs to companies like Micron and SandForce. Although Intel hopes to have performance leadership once more with its 25nm SSDs due out in Q4, the priorities have shifted. Intel’s focus is on bringing SSDs to the mainstream; it wants a bigger slice of the HDD pie. At the end of the day, that’s where the money is.

At just over $200 that’s affordable enough for high end notebooks and desktops but what about more mainstream price points? For many the $99 mark is key. Luckily as SSDs have gotten faster, a new breed of small, affordable SSDs have emerged right around the $100 mark. Today we’re going to take a look at three of those devices.

Last week we looked at the ASUS U30Jc and found a lot to like… so much that we awarded it a Bronze Editors' Choice. The stock configuration comes with a conventional hard drive, but SSDs are all the rage these days. What happens to performance when you install a decent SSD, like a 120GB OCZ Vertex? We happened to have one waiting for just such a test, so here are the updated results. Hint: it's a lot faster, at least when the HDD is the bottleneck.