CDRLabs kicks off the week with a review of Crucial's new BX100 solid state drive. Aimed at the budget-conscious consumer looking to upgrade their system to an SSD, the BX100 offers substantial yet affordable performance gains. Powered by Silicon Motion's SM2246EN controller and available with up to 1TB of Micron's 16nm 128gb NAND, the drive delivers true 535 MB/s sequential reads on both compressible and incompressible data for faster boot up speeds and shorter application load times. Also, with Crucial's Extreme Energy Efficiency technology, the BX100 is two times more energy efficient than a typical hard drive, allowing users to run their systems longer, using less power.

Sonnet today announced the Fusion PCIe Flash Drive, a rugged, pocket-size solid-state drive (SSD) storage device with 256GB or 512GB storage capacity — and the newest member of Sonnet’s growing family of Thunderbolt 2 technology products. The Sonnet flash drive serves as an ultra-fast alternative to USB thumb drives and portable SATA-based hard disk drive and SSD storage products, and it connects to a compatible Mac or Windows computer, or at the end of a Thunderbolt device daisy chain, via an attached 0.5-meter Thunderbolt cable.

Sonnet designed the Fusion PCIe Flash Drive around the latest generation M.2 PCIe SSD module, which is the fastest standard SSD type now available, and a 20Gbps Thunderbolt 2 interface that provides the bandwidth necessary for the device to sustain ultra-high file transfer speeds — fast enough to support 4K workflows. Capable of transferring files at over 1200 MB/s, the Fusion PCIe Flash Drive’s SSD module incorporates a PCIe Gen 3 flash controller, enabling the device to significantly outperform 6Gbps SATA SSDs and USB 3.0 flash drives.

Helping the world harness the power of data, HGST, a Western Digital company, today announced it is shipping its NVMe compliant Ultrastar SN100 Series PCIe SSDs – the industry's highest-performing NVMe compliant SSDs. Ideally suited for mission-critical data center workloads, including scale-out databases powering today's largest online and cloud services, the HGST SN100 series enables businesses to achieve a better return on their data center infrastructure investments by realizing gains such as more database transactions per second, lower access latency and easier application scaling.

The new HGST PCIe SSDs are a key building block for delivering HGST server-side Flash solutions. In these solutions, the Ultrastar SN100 Series SSDs are combined with HGST server software – specifically, the HGST Flash Software Suite and HGST Device Manager. This powerful combination creates a server-side Flash platform solution with superior TCO that delivers clustering, scalability, high availability and manageability for performance applications. For MySQL, HGST's server-side Flash solutions have delivered up to 40 percent server consolidation with up to 60 percent performance improvement while maintaining existing MySQL architectures.

LaCie, the premium brand from Seagate Technology plc, announced today that its iconic Rugged Thunderbolt storage solution will be available in a 1 TB SSD capacity. With double the storage, the new LaCie Rugged is just as portable with no size or weight increase compared to the 500 GB offering. Plus, it still features the lightning–fast transfer rates of Thunderbolt and is tough in the field with shock, dust and water resistance.

"My expeditions take me all over the globe so I need equipment that's up for any terrain," said photographer and National Geographic Expeditions expert Kike Calvo. "The LaCie Rugged is my go–to hard drive because its fast speeds help back up my work quickly, and its toughness has yet to let me down. With the addition of drones into my workflow, I'm creating more content than ever before. So larger capacity in the same reliable enclosure means I can take fewer drives and save valuable luggage space."