Apple has a well-earned reputation for being restrictive on hardware upgrades, for anyone who is a little handy with components and would like to upgrade the Mac Pro or Mac book they own, is going to be limited to a few options. Recently, Apple has restricted this even more with soldered on RAM or sealed iMac's that are very risky to open up. For some time now, Apple has used a proprietary M.2 style connector format using a 12 + 16 Pin arrangement on their M.2 drives, either made by Toshiba or Samsung (SSUAX or SSUBX).
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We have had the Crucial MX500 250GB for a few months now and so it's about time we got round to reviewing it. Crucial sent this over to us a while ago and ever since we have been running the MX500 250GB SSD for a long period of time, allowing us to understand its day to day performance, and by the performance, we don't just mean test results. We have used it as an external drive, a spare drive, and OS drive and it's currently installed in a doc as a MacOS Time Machine back up drive.
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Last year, Hardwareslave went out to test the cheapest M.2 SSD 240Gb drive there was, no matter who made it, or what it was. We stumbled on the DREVO D1 M.2 2280 240GB Internal SSD, at the time it was the cheapest we could find in M.2 Form Factor. We purchased it for £64.99, a bargain we thought, but our tests would show if it was a bad purchase or not.
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We’ve reviewed most of Crucial's SSD product line over the years and it’s given us some good insight into their market placement and development. We have recently reviewed the MX300 1Tb SSD, effectively the third generation of their MX series, and it gave a good score and representation of Crucial. Now we are on to the third generation of the BX series, the BX300, which was released recently.
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Crucial are releasing a lot of MX300 SSD including the recent 525Gb and 2TB versions. There’s also an M.2 version in the range as previously promised. If you can’t stretch to a 2Tb SSD and want a little more than the 525GB then we also have the 1TB model, which we have for review today. The Model is badged 1050MB on the box but it’s the 1TB model.
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We reviewed the Lexar Professional Workflow DD512 last year and it got a Recommended award from us. We liked its speed, size and price, and all from a USB external SSD aimed at the professional consumer, hence the name Workflow. Fast forward a few months and Lexar release a new portable SSD, and its actually just called the Portable SSD. There are two versions, the 256Gb and the 512Gb, the latter we are reviewing today. With the Workflow aimed at the more professional consumer, someone who wants to use it for AV work or carrying around a portfolio to another office or client, the Lexar Portable SSD looks to be aimed at the everyday consumer, despite being a very similar product.
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Crucial have just released the latest in their MX range, the MX300. The MX300 uses Micron 3D NAND, which Crucial are calling the most advanced storage technology they’ve had in an SSD. Crucial also plan more to come later this year with the technology seen in the MX300 release, including additional capacities and form factors.
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For years the Hard Disk Drive was the mainstay of all commercial personal computers around the world. It’s had a bashing lately from the superb Solid State Drive technology, paving the future for fast, low power and robust main system storage. So where does this leave the not so humble HDD? Of late, the HDD has had a bit of a comeback, but only from a capacity point of view. HDD’s have pushed forward with a new lease of life as the ultimate back up and server or NAS storage solutions.
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Solid state drives are very different from the legacy HDD’s, but not just in a technology sense. HDD’s had pretty much hit their development peak when SSD’s started to take off. They have since seen a rebirth with much larger capacities and new technologies keeping them well ahead of the SSD variety of storage. This was more about capacity than anything else, whereas SSD’s have the untapped development edge to their name and having non storage manufacturers developing the technology.
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We have a bit of a dual review today, in a couple of different ways. SSDs are the mainstay of enthusiast system configuration, in single or dual disk configuration. So it is only right that we have a look at single disk and RAID 0 configurations. What we are also going to look at is the new Skylake Z170 chipset verses the X99, or Haswell-E chipset. The Z170 chipset seems to have resolved long standing performance issues with the Intel storage RAID controller and indeed we have seen some performance increases with some recent reviews we are publishing soon.
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Never being satisfied with the latest and greatest solid state drives, a wonder component a few years ago, Hardwareslave have been looking for something a little bit special. Step in PCIe SSD drives and for most the price isn't going to be achievable, but they are probably the ultimate in gaming storage. What else is there? Well, there is RAID, and we RAID every rig we build, and there is mSATA, but its always going to be bottle necked by the SATA ports. So, it only leaves M.2, a specification that uses PCIe bandwidth to bus your info around without the riser card expense.
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We recently reviewed the Lexar Professional Workflow DD512 and liked it. Lexar fulfilled our perception of their company with the DD512 as an excellent, professional and focused product. Today we have something a little simpler and something we think a many people already have a lot of; the USB pen drive. What makes this different from your multi coloured no-name variety? Let's find out.
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Lexar, now owned by Crucial Technology, have been around the Personal Computers for nearly 20 years now, from a time when they probably were truly personal. So they should know a thing or two about PC users, their needs, wants and desires. Fast, small and large capacity external drives is certainly one of them and Lexar have a couple out their. Today we review the Lexar Professional Workflow DD512, aimed at the professional who uses and moves large files either on the go, or just around the office, that's all of us then!
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Kingston have always been manufacturers of RAM memory and flash devices, and in more recent years storage manufacturers. Why, well until the advent of SSD's, Kingston did not manufacture large storage discs, in fact we don't recall them ever creating an old school HDD. Let's jump ahead and enter the HyperX Savage range, their top SSD drive in their consumer range. Taking aim at the likes of Samsung and Crucial, the HyperX Savage range has some stiff competition
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Crucial have recently been refreshing and extending their ranges of memory, with DDR4 and SSDs with new models such as the Crucial MX200 and BX100 SSDs. Performance, silence and low power have become the norm and unless you are wanting big storage numbers, you won’t go wrong with an SSD. Crucial have been manufacturers for years now and they have a big product catalogue to browse and now they are expanding their range even further.
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