Last week Crucial updated their firmware for the m4 family of SSDs. The new m4 firmware, version 0009, is a direct update for retail drives that shipped either with firmware version 0001 or 0002. While firmware 0009 patches bugs and improves on compatibility with host systems, the highlight is Crucial’s claim that sequential read speeds

Just last week we broke the news that OWC had migrated to Toshiba toggle NAND in their high-end Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD family. Not just that, but the 240GB and 480GB capacities took home a processor upgrade too, moving from a SandForce SF-2281 to an SF-2282. We’ve spent the last week working over the

OWC announced the Electra SSD in June as a mainstream companion to their enthusiast-class SSD Mercury Extreme Pro 6G. The Electra features the SandForce SF-2281 processor and Intel/Micron 25nm asynchronous NAND which combine with a SATA 6Gb/s interface to deliver sequential reads up to 556MB/s and writes up to 523MB/s.

Patriot announced their Wildfire line of SSDs in March, in line with the SandForce SF-2281 release. At the time of the announcement Patriot planned on disabling RAISE on their drives, which essentially gives the user a more capacity, in exchange for a performance hit of around 10%. They’ve changed course here instead opting for enabling

The Corsair Force Series GT is an enthusiast-class SSD based on the SandForce SF-2281 processor and SATA 6Gb/s interface. While a little late to the party, the Force Series GT is based on a well-seasoned platform that delivers quoted read speeds of 555MB/s and writes of 525MB/s with 85,000 IOPS. For buyers wanting the latest

Intel SSDs are best known for providing good performance, compatibility, and reliability. We take the company’s latest, the 510 series, and put it in RAID levels 0, 1, 5, and 6, plus a special four-drive RAID 0 configuration and achieve some astonishing performance numbers. To get an idea of just how fast these drives are,

OCZ has taken market stratification to its textbook definition with their ever growing SSD family. Within the SATA 6Gb/s space, they offer four drives (in order of performance) including the Vertex 3 Max IOPS, Vertex 3, Agility 3 and our subject today, the Solid 3. Being at the back of the line though isn’t always

The recent refresh of notebooks by Lenovo and others has given users new storage options by way of an mSATA port. Previously the ThinkPads, for instance, had such a port but it was used for things like wireless cards, never being properly enabled for use with SSDs. Now, along with Lenovo, vendors like Asus and

The OCZ Agility 3 fills the mid-range gap of OCZ’s SSD lineup; but don’t let “mid-range” or “mainstream” fool you. The Agility 3 uses a SATA 6Gb/s interface and the SandForce SF-2281 processor to drive 525MB/s read speeds, 500MB/s writes and 45,000 4KB random write IOPS – those are just a hair under the Vertex