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At IFA Berlin 2026, Lexar showed its new Muse SSD, a drive just 3.8mm thick at its thickest point that tapers to 1mm at the edges. It comes in 512GB and 1TB capacities, offers up to 1,050 MB/s read and 1,000 MB/s write speeds, and uses a proprietary PogoPin connection with a magnetic SnapLink cable instead of USB-C. Lexar says it supports direct external ProRes 4K recording at up to 120 fps on compatible iPhones.
Solid-state drives now come in two main interface types: SATA, which tops out near 600 MB/s in theory and 500-560 MB/s in real-world use, and NVMe, which runs over PCIe and can hit roughly 3,500 MB/s on older Gen3 drives up to nearly 15,000 MB/s on newer Gen5 models. Both technologies store data on flash memory and vastly outperform mechanical hard drives, but they differ sharply in how they connect to and communicate with a computer.
Teardown analysis from Expand Mac mini shows the new M6 and M5 Pro Mac mini models have their NAND storage soldered directly to the logic board, reversing the removable SSD design found in the previous M4 Mac mini. Expand Mac mini, which sells cheaper aftermarket storage modules for the M4 lineup, says supporting the newer chips now looks unlikely.
Most laptops that feel slow are not short of processing power. They are held back by a hard drive, a lack of memory, a clogged fan, or a browser doing too much.
Newegg is selling the MSI Spatium M461 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD for $299.99 using promo code SSD73852, working out to about 10 cents per gigabyte. The drive uses a Phison E21T controller with 3D NAND and NVMe 1.4 support, delivering sequential speeds up to 5,000/4,200 MBps read/write, backed by a five-year warranty and 900 TBW endurance rating.
DapuStor introduced a dual-mode firmware for its enterprise J5060 SSD that lets operators carve out a portion of QLC flash to run as pSLC, boosting speed at the cost of capacity. Depending on configuration, users sacrifice 6% to 20% of QLC storage in exchange for random-write performance that's over seven times faster, with the fixed region exposed as its own block device rather than a dynamic cache. The drive, shown at FMS 2026, spans 15.36TB to 122.88TB capacities but still has no announced price, customer, or release date.
Sony currently sells the PS5 in Slim and Pro tiers, with the Slim offering both digital-only and disc-drive versions while the Pro comes only in digital form with an optional $80 disc drive add-on. The digital Slim now costs $600 for 825GB, down from its original 1TB capacity, while the $650 disc version still ships with a full 1TB and can play physical games through 2027. The $900 Pro is largely sold out, likely due to demand tied to the GTA VI trailer reveal.
Amazon has discounted the HyperDrive Next Thunderbolt 5 Dock to $319.99, an $80 cut from its $399.99 list price, matching its lowest price to date. The dock combines a Thunderbolt 5 hub with a built-in M.2 NVMe SSD enclosure, letting users store files directly inside the unit rather than using a separate external drive.
A Reddit user known as Tsuto says weekly visits to their county landfill's electronics recycling area have yielded enough discarded SSDs, HDDs, GPUs, RAM and even a laptop to assemble a working Proxmox home lab server. The rig combines scavenged parts—mirrored 256GB SSDs, a 1TB SSD, and three 2TB HDDs in RAID1 for ZFS storage—with a Core i7-7700 and 64GB of RAM bought separately on Amazon. Tsuto also salvaged an Asus ROG laptop with a GTX 860M GPU, fixed with a $25 replacement battery, for casual gaming.
Wokyis has released the G5 and G7, retro-styled docking stations designed for the Mac mini and Mac Studio respectively, styled after the original 1984 Macintosh. The docks pack a 7-inch flip-up display, nine remappable physical controls, an NVMe SSD enclosure supporting up to 8TB, and a mix of high-speed ports including Thunderbolt 5 on the 80Gbps configuration. Both 10Gbps and 80Gbps versions are available, with card readers, USB-A/C ports, HDMI, DisplayPort and a headphone jack rounding out the connectivity.
External SSDs use flash storage that speeds up file transfers and editing directly from the drive, while offering greater durability, quieter operation, and lower power draw thanks to having no moving parts. External hard drives remain the cheaper option per gigabyte, with examples like a 2TB Seagate HDD costing less than a 1TB Samsung T9 SSD.
Comparing a 256GB SSD to a 1TB hard drive isn't a simple capacity contest, since SSDs retrieve data electronically from flash memory while HDDs rely on spinning platters and moving read/write heads, making SSDs significantly faster for booting and running programs. Whether 256GB is enough depends heavily on usage: it suits light users who rely on cloud storage, while heavy local file storage, creative work or gaming may require 512GB, 1TB or more.