Sata articles

The average desktop PC has over 10 different types of connections and often sports over 30 individual sockets. Whether you're wanting to sort out SATA from M.2, or DVI-D from DisplayPort, welcome to our quick guide to sockets and ports.

To test and visualize how storage performance impacts the user experience in real world scenarios we recorded how quickly our Core i7-6700K test system completes various tasks using Samsung's new 960 Evo 500GB SSD, then compared against the value-minded Crucial MX300 and the WD Red Pro 4TB mechanical hard drive.

SSD technology grew stale after saturating the SATA 6Gb/s bus, bringing minor improvements and making up for it with price cuts. With new PCIe and M.2 drives presenting a high performance alternative, it's time for a roundup. We review fourteen of the best consumer-grade SSDs using the SATA, PCI Express or M.2 interfaces and tell you what to buy.

Equipped with 3D TLC NAND, Samsung's 'V-NAND'-based 850 Evo series released last December, stacks layer upon layer of transistors, improving density, endurance and performance, while lowering production costs. Today we have two similarly new drives that focus on different form factors. The 850 Evo mSATA will appeal to compact PC users, while the M.2 will be more sought after by power users.

Conventional hard drives are far from tapping SATA 3.0's 600MB/s bandwidth, yet those speeds have already grown inadequate for the quickest flash drives. With the arrival of SATA 3.2 Plextor is launching the new M6 range comprising a regular 2.5" SATA drive, and mSATA drive and a PCI Express/M.2 version. Today we're putting all three to the test.

Asrock's new Z87 Extreme11/ac may very well be the most extreme motherboard we've handled. It touts four-way GPU support, over 20(!) SATA ports, premium onboard audio, dual gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and – unsurprisingly – the largest price tag in its class. So, how exactly does a company justify $540 for a motherboard?