Back in February, Intel released its first SandForce based SSD: the Intel SSD 520. Since then Intel's SSD lineup has evolved. A couple of months after the 520's release, Intel released a more mainstream focused SSD 330. Architecturally the SSD 520 and 330 were the same as both used SandForce's SF-2281 controller and IMFT's MLC NAND. The only real differences were limited to NAND quality and firmware; the 520 used higher binned NAND with more P/E cycles and its firmware was also more finely tuned to provide better performance.

While SandForce has yet to release its 3rd generation SSD controller, there's still room to upgrade one major component of these drives: the NAND itself. IMFT (Intel's and Micron's NAND joint-venture) has been fairly open about its next generation NAND products, including the transition to 20nm MLC NAND. Moving to smaller process geometries decreases die area, which increases the number of NAND die that can be produced on a single wafer (or increases the capacity that can reliably be produced on a single die). The move to 20nm is a necessary part of continuing to drive SSD costs down, although as with all process transitions we won't see those cost savings initially (die savings are offset by higher costs of a new process at the start).

IMFT's 20nm announcement happened back in April 2011. At the time, we were told not to expect to see 64Gb 20nm MLC NAND devices in SSDs until the middle of 2012. Now, a year and a half later, production is finally at a stage where volume and yields are both high enough for an actual product release. The vehicle for introduction? Intel's SSD 335.

The decrease in NAND prices has opened doors for bigger SSD capacities. 512GB SSDs have been available for a couple of years now but even though prices have come down significantly, we haven't seen a move to capacities bigger than 512GB yet. There are some architectural limitations that cause this but there are a few exceptions that offer more than 512GB. OWC offers a 960GB Mercury Electra 3G MAX, which is among the first 2.5" SATA SSDs with 1TB of NAND. Read on to find out how it is built and how it performs.

Well over a year ago Micron announced something unique in a sea of PCIe SSDs that were otherwise nothing more than SATA drives in RAID on a PCIe card. The drive Micron announced was the P320h, featuring a custom ASIC and a native PCIe interface. The vast majority of PCIe SSDs we've looked at thus far feature multiple SATA/SAS SSD controllers with their associated NAND behind a SATA/SAS RAID controller on a PCIe card. These PCIe SSDs basically deliver the performance of a multi-drive SSD RAID-0 on a single card instead of requiring multiple 2.5" bays. There's decent interest in these types of PCIe SSDs simply because of the form factor advantage as many servers these days have moved to slimmer form factors (1U/2U) that don't have all that many 2.5" drive bays. Long term however, this SATA/SAS RAID on a PCIe card SSD solution is clunky at best. Ideally you'd want a native PCIe controller that could talk directly to the NAND, rather than going through an unnecessary layer of abstraction. That's exactly what Micron's P320h promised. Today, we have a review of that very drive.

Samsung has been making steady progress in becoming one of the major players in the consumer SSD market. Even before the SSD 470, Samsung was a major player in the industry with their mostly OEM SSDs, but this took a dramatic change when the SSD 830 was released. Samsung never really marketed the SSD 470, even though it was a reasonable competitor back at its launch. The SSD 830 was Samsung’s first SSD that really received media and consumer attention, and for good reason: it was one of the best consumer SSDs on the market.

With the 840 and 840 Pro, Samsung took a big step forward in marketing. Instead of hosting a regular press release and providing reviewers with the drives, Samsung flew around 70 media representatives from all around the world to Seoul, South Korea for their Global SSD Summit. Samsung spent two days talking about their new drives, including several live demos and presentations on Samsung’s future plans. For the first time, Samsung also opened the doors of one their NAND manufacturing plants to media and we were allowed to meet with some of their engineers in person and ask questions about their NAND and SSDs.

We have already reviewed the 840 Pro, but Samsung did not sample the regular 840 until the Summit. I started testing the 840 right after I got back from Seoul and I was able to provide you with some preliminary benchmarks shortly after, but today we’re back with the full review. Is the 840 really as good as the early benchmarks show? Read on and find out!

If we had an award for most improved in the SSD space, it would have to go to Samsung. When we first encountered Samsung MLC drives a few years ago they were pretty bad. Prices were high and performance was low. Samsung offered no end-user upgradable firmware for those early drives either, although that was eventually rectified. The first Samsung MLC SSDs were reliable, they just weren't worth the money when you had much better options from companies like Intel.

Samsung had all of the right pieces for success however. Like Intel, Samsung made its own NAND, controller and wrote its own firmware. Unlike Intel, Samsung stuck to the vertically integrated formula.

I remember arguing with Samsung engineers a few years ago about the importance of random IO performance compared to sequential speed. I remember feeling like they were making the same mistake that all SSD makers were making back then: heavily prioritizing sequential IO when it was a failure to deliver good random IO performance as well that really hurt SSD adoption. Although the first Samsung SSDs weren't very good, they got better over time. While the first generation couldn't be recommended, the Samsung SSD 470 could. It still wasn't our favorite drive, but it finally brought performance up to a reasonable level. Last year's 830 release showed us that Samsung woke up. Today, Samsung is adding two new members to the family: the Samsung SSD 840 and the 840 Pro. The former is the first productized consumer SSD to use Samsung's 21nm 3-bit-per-cell MLC (aka TLC) NAND, while the latter is Samsung's new flagship drive using 21nm 2bpc MLC NAND.

Unfortunately we don't have samples of the unique TLC SSD 840, just the MLC 840 Pro. Despite the use of TLC NAND, Samsung claims the vanilla 840 should offer similar performance to the current 830. Samsung also claims that endurance should be reasonable for consumer workloads.

The 840 Pro should be tangibly faster than the 830 thanks to a new controller, new firmware and new NAND. Read on for our full review of the Samsung SSD 840 Pro.

The market for network attached storage (NAS) devices has registered huge gains over the last few years. In keeping up with the market trends, the coverage of NAS units has also seen an uptick on AnandTech since the middle of 2010.  We strive to provide readers with comprehensive coverage and improve our reviews with the help of reader and industry feedback. Some of the aspects which are barely covered in most NAS reviews include the performance of the unit when accessed from multiple clients and performance degradation as the disks get filled up. Towards the end of 2011, we started evaluating approaches to cover these important aspects. The end result was a new NAS testbed.

Read on for details of our approach and build process. We will also have a sneak peek at what can be expected in the upcoming NAS reviews.

Promise was the first to get us a Thunderbolt chassis with the Pegasus R4/R6. Not only was the Pegasus the first shipping Thunderbolt storage chassis, but it continues to be among the fastest on the market. If you've never seen one, the Pegasus R4/R6 is a 4 or 6 bay 3.5" external storage array with built in RAID and Thunderbolt controllers. Promise doesn't ship a chassis without drives, so you get to choose from between 4TB in the lightest configuration (4 x 1TB drives) at $1050 all the way up to 18TB (6 x 3TB) in the beefiest $3000 config. Sequential IO performance is great, generally hitting around 700MB/s for a 6-drive RAID-5 array. There's room for improvement, but running several drives in RAID-0 is typically not the best idea for redundancy.

The biggest issue with the Pegasus (other than cost) is that it doesn't ship with solid state drives. Although the use of 3.5" mechanical hard drives results in good sequential performance and great capacity, random IO performance suffers. After all, even a single SSD tends to have an order of magnitude better random IO performance than a hard drive. For most Thunderbolt use cases (e.g. tossing video/audio/photo work), the Pegasus' array of hard drives is fine. The world is clearly moving towards solid state storage however, and with LaCie offering an SSD version of its Little Big Disk series of Thunderbolt drives Promise had to respond.

The result is this, the Pegasus J2:

Read on for our full review!