Could SandForce SF-2281 based SSDs have no real competitors out there? This isn’t true and today we are going to check out contemporary solid state drives based on the second most popular controller – Marvell 88SS9174.

Intel has finally refreshed their enthusiast SSD line-up by launching drives built on second generation SandForce controllers. Is it another SF-2281 clone? Not at all! Intel’s products come with exclusive firmware, which puts them one step above all other currently existing solid state drives.

Among SSDs from OCZ there is one very interesting series of products – Octane built on a unique Indilinx Everest controller. We haven’t yet reviewed drives like that therefore it was particularly interesting to see if Octane would become a worthy competitor to popular SSDs on SandForce and Marvell controllers. Especially since OCZ has recently released a new firmware update for their Octane series, which significantly improves their performance.

Can a well-known cooling product manufacturer roll out a good SSD? Yes, he can, because the second generation SandForce platform paved a very short route to the SSD market for those interested.

Today almost every mainboard has onboard RAID controllers. So, why not try increase the performance of the disk sub-system by building a RAID 0 array of a couple of SSD drives?

The market is full of versatile SSDs on second-generation SandForce controllers. However, they are not the same. Let’s see how the flagship ADATA product stands out among many other alternatives.

We have recently received two more SSD drives from Corsair based on the second generation SandForce controller. Let’s check out their performance and also investigate how SSD speed scales depending on their storage capacity.

We have already learned that not all USB 3.0 flash drives are equally good. But is the same true about the external USB 3.0 hard drives or their performance difference will fall within the measuring error margin? Let’s check out seven products from Seagate, Silicon Power, Transcend and Western Digital to answer this question.

The last HDD roundup on our site was dedicated to 500 GB drives. Today we are going to check out nine models with 1 TB storage capacity from Seagate and Western Digital.

The variety of available USB 3.0 drives keep growing day by day, but as we all know by now, not all of them are equally good. Today we are going to introduce to you another three USB 3.0 flash drives and check out their ability to compete against an external hard disk drive supporting the same exact interface.

We tested seven high-speed solid state drives built on second generation SandForce controller that support SATA 6 Gbps. Please welcome our heroes: Corsair Force 3, Corsair Force GT, Kingston HyperX, OCZ Agility 3, OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS, Patriot Pyro and Patriot Wildfire.

What if you decided to build a hybrid storage drive for a system based on something other than Intel Z68 chipset? HighPoint released their RocketHybrid 1220 controller, which allows creating a hybrid drive using a fast SSD and an inexpensive HDD with large storage capacity. Will the HighPoint controller be able to challenge Intel Smart Response? Let’s find out!

The today’s most popular way of moving data around and transferring it from one computer system to another is definitely USB flash drives. However, now that we have gigabytes of data the USB 2.0 speed may become a bottleneck. Will the transition to faster USB 3.0 interface help flash drives resolve this issue and is it justified at this time?

This year we welcomed the next generation of solid state drives, which major distinguishing feature was SATA 6 Gbps interface support. No wonder, since the old 3 Gbps interface limited the potential of the new SSDs. But which SSD to choose? To answer this question we gathered together and tested popular SSDs with SATA 6 Gbps support from Crucial, Intel and OCZ Technology.

Although the market is already under the great impression from the new SSDs with SATA-600 interface, we shouldn’t forget about the great time-tested products supporting older interface version, which offer excellent performance and therefore are a perfect choice for older systems upgrade.

Today we are going to talk about SSDs with PCI –Express interface. This type of devices is free from a common bottleneck – insufficiently fast SATA interface, so this is where we should be looking for a performance leader.

Today we are going to talk about the hard disk drives with today’s largest capacity of 3 terabytes. We will discuss products from Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital in the same roundup.

Our today’s roundup will talk about all sorts of drives: individual drives, RAID 0 arrays of drives, drives supporting SATA300, SATA600 and PCI Express interface… They all have one thing in common – they are SSDs.

This roundup will talk about new hard disk drives models that came out in second half of 2010. We will discuss 15 HDDs from Hitachi, Samsung and Western Digital.

This little investigative article will be devoted to the development and changes in the flash memory market. We are going to dwell particularly on the most interesting flash memory application – solid state drives.