Content and news by Robert Tanner

Dota 2 fans likely are already familiar with TI, but for everyone else: Valve’s The International is an annual multi-million dollar Dota 2 tournament. This year, TI is in its fifth edition and continues to shatter records with a current prize pool of $18 million and is being played live at Seattle’s…..

Valve’s fifth annual Dota 2 tournament is continuing with tradition, demolishing TI4’s $10.9 million record for the largest prize pool for a videogame tournament in the same fashion as Ti4 did to Ti3’s record of “just” $2.87 million before it.  At $16.6 million as of this writing, all fundraising goals have already been…..

For those consumers and prosumers that gotta have it all (or at least store it all on a single SSD),  Samsung has announced the first 2.5” 2TB solid-state drives targeting mainstream consumers. Some enthusiasts have been clamoring for a larger capacity SSD and Samsung is now looking to deliver. The 850 Pro…..

For better or worse (for our wallets at least), Steam’s Summer Sale is nearly upon us. This year’s mystery summer sale cards are already out (though not fully revealed), making the rumored June 11th date sounding highly likely. So what better time is there for Valve to announce a new refund policy?…..

Kingston has taken the wraps off its new flagship HyperX Savage brand of SSDs powered by the Phison S 10 controller. The S10, (or PS3110), is a typical quad-core eight-channel NAND controller which gives it enough oomph to easily saturate the standard SATA 6Gb/s interface. Phison has become a staple name in…..

How does 743,000 random read IOPS sound? Not wanting to be left out of the PCIe SSD renaissance brought about by NVM Express, HGST has unveiled its Ultrastar SN100 PCIe drives with truly impressive performance. The SN100 is primarily targeting datacenter and enterprise deployments and of course will include native NVMe support.…..

Samsung’s SM951 was a hot item when it was first announced, but unfortunately, it was intended as an OEM-only drive making it hard for prospective buyers to snag one. To make matters worse. there was a great deal of confusion abound surrounding early announcements versus actual launch day capabilities, a major point of…..

Goodbye SATA, hello PCI Express! At long last the tyranny of the SATA 6Gb/s interface is over. Intel has taken the wraps off its first PCIe based consumer and workstation solid-state drive, and it’s a doozy. The 750 Series is a fully functional PCIe Gen 3 x4 drive with bootable NVMe support,…..

It was only roughly six months ago that a read performance bug affecting all Samsung TLC solid-state drives came to light. Old, or “stale” data that had not been re-written would begin to see increasing level of read performance degradation based on the age of the data, at times so severe that…..

Mushkin has been no stranger to SSDs since the introduction of the Callisto way back in 2010, and once again it looks to be updating its product portfolio. Gone are the days of 2nd Gen SandForce; instead, Mushkin is adopting the new Phison S10 controller. The Phison S10 is a quad-core, 8-channel…..

Just about everyone is announcing new SSDs at CES 2015 and Crucial is no exception with two new product families expected to reach the market later this quarter. First up is the MX200, which just so happens to be the consumer variant of the Micron M600 that debuted last September. Like the…..

I’ll admit a dirty little secret. For a long time now, SSD launches rarely spark any interest in considering an upgrade of my personal midrange SSD. Just like with processors, after a certain threshold,, the performance gains just aren’t tangible outside of specialized programs and benchmarks. Samsung apparently decided to fix that…..

Kingston is showcasing a new addition to the still-fledging discrete PCIe SSD market with the announcement of the HyperX Predator. The Predator is an M.2 drive slotted into a PCIe Gen 2 x4 adapter card for one simple reason, performance. Sequential read speeds are listed as up to 1,400MB/s and writes at…..

OCZ Storage Solutions is gearing up to debut its new solid-state drive controller, codenamed JetExpress. JetExpress will make the first SSD controller designed in-house by OCZ since its acquisition and major restructuring by Toshiba Group, so it will be intriguing to watch OCZ’s future products that will utilize this controller. As the…..

SanDisk is starting CES 2015 by announcing two new models in its SSD lineup. The SanDisk “SSD Plus” will be a 2.5” entry-level drive geared for consumers looking to enter the solid-state drive market on a budget, while the Ultra II mSATA SSD takes the popular Ultra II brand and gives it…..

Samsung has unveiled its latest creation, the 850 EVO solid-state drive family. The 850 EVO is slated to be the successor to the incredibly popular 840 EVO line of SSDs. While the 850 Pro retains the flagship performance and endurance spotlight, the EVO slots in as the more budget-friendly alternative. The 840…..

Talk about unexpected. At a time when fabless SSD manufacturers are consolidating or being snapped up by companies with in-house NAND production, AMD is bucking the industry trend by announcing the launch of the Radeon R7 SSD family. The company’s Radeon R7 SSDs are powered with a Barefoot 3 M00, the exact…..

In a deal that makes the lottery jackpot look like mere pocket change, SanDisk has announced its intent to buy Fusion-io for $1.1 billion in pure cash. Fusion-io was founded in 2006, and in 2007 with the launch of the ioDrive it became one of the first companies to lead the charge…..

Does $0.43-per-GB sound good to you? Crucial has unveiled its SATA 6Gb/s MX100 series as a replacement for the venerable M500 family, while the M550 will stay on as the higher performance/capacity alternative. The MX100 is based on the Marvell 88SS9189 controller that is similar to the one found in the M550,…..

Enthusiasts, rejoice! After what has been a very long dry spell, Intel has reawakened to the enthusiast market and is poised to deliver two impressive processor launches this month. Both chips are part of the larger Haswell-refresh launch with several other models receiving normal 100MHz frequency bumps. The first launch is Devil’s Canyon, a…..