Micron has remained one of the more stable players in the SSD space over the past few years. Although not typically at the top of our charts, Micron (and its consumer brand, Crucial) have generally paired the latest in NAND technology with custom firmware that’s well validated. It sounds like a simple combination, but it’s so rarely found in an industry that’s growing quickly enough to both those that are first to market as well as those that are most reliable.

On the enterprise front, Micron is looking to fill a gap in its product lineup. In the 2.5” SATA form factor, Micron really only had two offerings: the dated SLC-based P300, and the entry level P400e. The former was built for a market that has increasingly moved to high-endurance MLC NAND, while the latter wasn’t robust enough to deal with any of the more write-heavy enterprise environments. Filling the gap is the drive we’re looking at today: Micron’s P400m. Read on for our full review!

Last week we published a teaser look at Intel's latest mSATA SSD: the Intel SSD 525. At the time we only presented performance for a single 240GB drive, however Intel decided to break the mold and send us nearly every capacity in the 525 lineup. We've finally completed testing of the remaining capacities and can now bring you a full look at the Intel SSD 525 lineup.

Read on for our full review!

The mSATA SSD space has been heating up over the past year as Ultrabooks and other small form factor devices like Intel’s NUC have continued to grow in popularity. While mostly a placeholder until M.2 (formerly NGFF) SSDs show up on the market, mSATA drives are currently the only solution if you need a standardized small form factor 6Gbps SATA SSD.

Due to physical limitations, the largest mSATA SSDs on the market today are still 240/256GB as there’s only room for 4 NAND packages (8 x 8GB die per package). The transition to 128Gbit NAND die will double this to 480/512GB so I’d expect that limit to be broken in the next quarter or two.

Although there are capacity limitations, there are no real performance limitations to delivering an mSATA SSD. As we found in our review of Micron’s mSATA C400, you can deliver the same performance as a 2.5” SSD in the mSATA form factor. It’s a pretty amazing thing to think about. You get more performance out of a tiny mSATA SSD than out of a stack of 10K RPM hard drives.

Intel has been dabbling in the mSATA space for a while now. Until Monday the fastest mSATA SSD Intel made was based on Intel’s first controller technology, but earlier this week that all changed with the announcement of the Intel SSD 525.

Read on for our full review of the 525!

Transcend is a Taiwanese company specializing in memory and flash storage solutions. While Transcend may not be the first company that comes to mind about NAND flash, they have been in the industry since the late 80's. Transcend's USB flash sticks and SD cards are actually rather popular at least here in the northern Europe, but they aren't exactly known for their SSDs. Like many other smaller SSD OEMs, Transcend relies on SandForce's SF-2281 platform. The lineup consists of two models, the SSD720 and SSD320, which Transcend sent us in for reviewing. Read on to find out how they perform!

Every now and then we receive a request from a smaller SSD manufacturer to review their products. We rarely say no to such a request and we try to treat all manufacturers equally regardless of how big they are. MyDigitalSSD is one of the less known SSD manufacturers, although that's not a surprise as they rely on their own distribution channel instead of selling at NewEgg or other major online retailers. MyDigitalSSD sent us two of their mSATA SSDs for review, the SMART and BP3. The SMART is a typical SandForce SF-2281 based SSD but in mSATA form factor while the BP3 is a more interesting drive. It's based on Phison's first SATA 6Gbps controller, which is something we haven't reviewed before. Read on to find out how the drives perform!

Apple has the luxury of not competing at lower price points for its Macs, which makes dropping hard drives an easier thing to accomplish. Even so, out of the 6 distinct Macs that Apple ships today (MBA, rMBP, MBP, Mac mini, iMac and Mac Pro), only two of them ship without any hard drive option by default. The rest come with good old fashioned mechanical storage. Given the extremely positive impact an SSD has to user experience, it seems inevitable that Apple would move all of its systems to SSDs.

Moving something like the iMac to a solid state configuration is pretty tough to pull off however. While notebook users (especially anyone using an ultraportable) are already used to not having multiple terabytes of storage at their disposal, someone replacing a desktop isn’t necessarily well suited for the same.

Apple’s solution to the problem is, at a high level, no different than all of the PC OEMs who have tried hybrid SSD/HDD solutions in the past. The difference is in the size of the SSD component of the solution, and the software layer.

I spent a month with Apple's Fusion Drive in the new 27-inch iMac. Read on to find out how it compares to other SSD caching solutions and if it can truly approximate a standalone SSD setup.