Storage articles

I've been trying to get my hands on QNAP's new quad-core, 16-bay TS-1635 ever since it was announced. Marketed as a cost-effective business NAS, it's definitely not cheap at a little over $1,000, but looking at the competition we find QNAP is well positioned where it counts.

A tough act to follow for the competition, even for the likes of Intel, Corsair announced the Force MP500 SSD shortly after the release of the dominating Samsung 960 Series. The Force MP500 is a high-speed NVMe SSD targeting power users available in a variety of capacities: 480GB, 240GB and even a piddly 120GBer.

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.

"An external SSD that can beat Samsung T3," read the title of an email that I recently received. Curious, of course, I investigated further to find that ADATA was behind the bold claim. Its purported 'T3 destroyer' was also the smallest external SSD you can buy with an IP68 rated shockproof, waterproof and dustproof enclosure.

We liked what we saw when we tested Samsung's SSD 960 Pro a month ago, however we've been waiting for the mainstream bound 960 Evo which should bring similarly impressive throughput for less. Powered by Samsung's Polaris controller coupled with Samsung's 48-layer V-NAND (TLC), sequential read speeds are claimed to be in the order of 3.2GB/s plus 1.9GB/s writes which is impressive.

We've tested many of QNAP's offerings over the years and one of its most recent releases, the TS-x53A, just so happens to be on-hand today in its biggest form, touting eight drive bays, a Braswell quad-core SoC, and a heap of connectivity options.

With dozens of hours testing storage devices under our belt in the last year alone, we have a pretty clear idea of what are the top devices you should buy right now, divided into five categories: Best performance SSD, best value SSD, best hard drives, best external storage device and best home/SMB NAS.

Samsung's next generation solid state drives are poised to become must-haves among enthusiasts. The 960 Pro that we are reviewing today succeeds what was already a fast drive with last year's award-winning 950 Pro. Surprise, surprise: the new SSD 960 Pro is even faster.

Sonnet is aiming at professionals who need first-class performance in an external drive. The Fusion PCIe Flash Drive takes advantage of Thunderbolt 3, as well as Samsung's excellent SM951 M.2 SSD. The result is a compact external drive capable of transfer speeds up to 2100 MB/s.