Chris Ramseyer

Introduction Crucial’s parent company Micron is not new to portable storage. Until two years ago, Lexar was under the Micron corporate umbrella and one of the highest recognized brands in portable storage. The Crucial X8 is this division’s first portable storage product. The X8 came from the same team that brought you the MX500, one of the best SATA SSDs shipping today, and the P1 NVMe SSD. The new X8 Portable SSD is much closer to the P1 than the MX500.

Introduction Flash has already killed the 15,000-RPM "high performance" disk drive and mature 4-bit per cell "QLC" is taking aim at the 10,000-RPM performance tier. Micron's weapon of choice to disrupt the 10K market is the 5210 Ion 2.5" SATA SSD. The 5210 Ion is the first 4-bit per cell SSD with the full gamut of enterprise features. The series is a direct swap to upgrade existing servers running spinning disks. The upgrade improves performance, power consumption, reliability and capacity.

Introduction Large-capacity low-cost SSDs are the Big Foot of the SSD market. Every now and then, someone claims to see one but upon closer inspection, something else is afoot. Patriot's P200 series isn't just about the massive 2TB capacity model but it's certainly the most interesting. The 2TB drive is the only one in the series to use the new Maxio MAS0902A controller.