Content and news by Robert Tanner

Have you ever had a craving for a hard drive the same size as those Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies? Seagate has just the drive for you, and anyone else who’s in the market for a svelte 7mm laptop drive but needs performance at an affordable price. Seagate’s Solid-State Hybrid Thin drive may be small, but it may just be the drive you’re looking for.

First mentioned during CES 2013, Micron now officially delivers on its promise of a 960GB SSD priced at a mere $0.62 per GB. The M500 delivers a long-awaited refresh to the venerable m4 SSD family, featuring an updated controller, new NAND, and especially, new pricing. And just to clear things up now,…..

Looking for a mainstream SSD but need help deciding which to choose? Is that $10 difference really worth it? Who’s got the most reliable SandForce based-SSD around? Why does Intel have so many SandForce SSDs anyway? All these questions and more are answered within!

It wasn’t that long ago that Micron announced the P400m, a special high-endurance model SSD designed for write-intensive enterprise applications. Following it up, Micron has just announced the P410m, which is the same SSD but with a serial-attached-SCSI port in a 2.5” form factor. The P410m will still feature the same or…..

OCZ is all-but-ready for next week’s CeBit conference in Hannover, Germany. Amongst other things, OCZ is expected to formally launch the much-anticipated Vector SSD in PCIe form, completely bypassing the SATA 3.0 interface bottleneck. As we found out in our own review, the Vector is currently the best overall performing SSD on…..

OCZ Technology has announced the launch of a brand-new Vertex 3 – or rather, Vertex 3.20. The original Vertex 3 utilized 25nm IMFT NAND, but as you might have surmised already, the Vertex 3.20 will be using 20nm IMFT NAND in its place. There are not a lot changes otherwise, as it…..

It’s the attack of the SandForce clones! Can any heroic atomic-powered SSD come to save us? Does Corsair’s Neutron have what it takes to rescue our PC in distress? Will the hordes of the positively-charged solid-state armies be neutralized in time? Tune in this week (or now) to find out!

Looking for an affordable SSD but demand a high-performance controller? Kingston’s SSDNow V300 is shaping up to be just that. Powered by a SandForce SF-2281 controller and paired with Toshiba’s 19nm Toggle-based NAND, it’s an aggressive entrant for its price-point. Let’s check it out.

Vector is OCZ’s first SSD release since the ushering in of a new CEO and fresh perspective on its direction. It’s also the first SSD to come equipped with both in-house firmware and controller. In effect, OCZ has built its Vector SSD from the ground up with its rich internal resources – has it paid off?

Crucial has unveiled the next generation of its M-family solid-state drives at this year’s CES. The M500 upgrades the Marvell controller to the 88SS9187-BLD2, which SSD aficionados may recognize as the controller from the Plextor M5 Pro drives. Crucial of course writes its own proprietary firmware for the controller, and Plextor does…..

Despite not having been out for too long, OCZ’s Vector SSD has already made a name for itself as one of the top-performing SSDs currently on the market. For any SSD to get much faster, it would require removing the SATA 3.0 (6Gbps) interface bottleneck, and so that is exactly what OCZ…..

CES 2013 is shaping up to be another busy show, with Corsair making a range of announcements regarding its well-received gaming peripherals.  To start off, the company is expanding its premier Vengeance line with a new gaming keyboard, a couple of mice, and a mat. Corsair is also taking the opportunity to…..

It’s amazing what a little competition can do. First it was FireWire that brought about much needed updates to the original 1.5Mbps USB spec, culminating in the venerable 480Mbps USB 2.0. Now apparently we may have Thunderbolt to thank for such a rapid update to the still very new USB 3.0 spec.…..

Kingston is no stranger to SSDs, in fact, over the past few years Kingston has literally offered the most diverse repertoire of solid-state drives available. By that we mean Kingston has utilized one or more generations of controllers from Toshiba, Marvell, Intel, JMicron, Samsung, and even SandForce with the high-performance HyperX series…..

In 2008, Intel kick-started the SSD revolution with its X25 series which housed one of the first reliable, solid-performing SSD controllers. Intel continued to make minor adjustments to its market-leading controller over the next several years but was eventually overtaken as newer, refined 6Gbps-based SSD controllers began to emerge in the market.…..

The Vertex is back, and this time it features more OCZ than ever before! (No, we’re not kidding.) Powered by its latest Everest 2 platform, the Vertex 4 is a completely in-house SSD that not only brings Indilinx back to the table, but very well has the potential to be the most reliable Vertex-branded SSD we’ve ever seen.

In an announcement that will surprise few, Valve has officially declared Dota 2 will be free-to-play. Better still, unlike LoL, all heroes will be unlocked and available for anyone to play. And if it couldn’t get any better, those in the Dota community worried that the shop will sell items that give players various advantages no longer…

It was only a matter of time. After initially launching the Vertex 4 SSD as its new flagship solid-state drive, we have the balanced price/performance alternative with the Agility 4. Just like its faster sibling, the Agility 4 is powered by a dual-core Marvell controller running an in-house Indilinx firmware package.

Gamers from yonder years may still recall quite a few companies that offered lifetime warranties on graphics cards (in some cases, double-lifetime), but everyone knows such agreements have become harder and harder to find as companies either exited the business or changed their warranty terms to stay competitive. With the defection…

It has been a few years but Indilinx is back! Since their splash into the consumer markets in 2008, SSDs have characteristically been doubling in performance with each successive launch of some controller on a roughly annual basis. Yet more recently, SandForce has managed to recapture and hold onto the performance crown.