SSDs
Multiple companies offer high-capacity SSDs, but until recently, only two companies offered high-performance 60 TB-class drives with a PCIe interface: Solidigm and Western Digital. As our colleagues from Blocks & Files discovered, Samsung quietly rolled out its BM1743 61.44 TB solid-state drive in mid-June and now envisions 120 TB-class SSDs based on the same platform. Samsung's BM1743 61.44 TB features a proprietary controller and relies on Samsung's 7th Generation V-NAND (3D NAND) QLC memory. Moreover, Samsung believes that its 7th Gen V-NAND 'has the potential to accommodate up to 122.88 TB,' Samsung plans to offer the BM1743 in two form factors: U.2 for PCIe 4.0 x4 to address traditional servers and E3.S for PCIe 5.0 x4 interfaces to address machines designed to offer maximum storage...
OWC Launches ThunderBay 4 Mini DAS: 4 SATA Bays With SoftRAID, Up to 1.5 GB/s
OWC has introduced a new small form factor high performance, high redundancy DAS for the professional market. The ThunderBay 4 Mini incorporates 4 2.5-inch storage bays, allowing it to...
29 by Anton Shilov on 12/16/2019Western Digital Announces WD Blue SN550 SSD
Western Digital is refreshing their NVMe-based WD Blue product line, replacing the WD Blue SN500 with the new WD Blue SN550. The SN550 updates both the controller and NAND...
15 by Billy Tallis on 12/10/2019The ADATA Ultimate SU750 1TB SSD Review: Realtek Does Storage, Part 1
Realtek has entered the SSD controller market and scored several design wins with ADATA for retail SSDs. The ADATA SU750 entry-level SATA drive is not as important to their...
54 by Billy Tallis on 12/6/2019Western Digital Starts Sales of WD_Black P50 USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 SSDs
Western Digital has started sales of its WD_Black P50 SSDs that were announced earlier this year. The drives are aimed at the high-performance market and are among the first...
17 by Anton Shilov on 12/5/2019GELID Unveils SubZero M.2 XL: A DIY Cooling System for M.2-22110 SSDs
GELID has introduced a rather unusual product: an aftermarket heatsink designed for SSDs that use the server/workstation-oriented M.2-22110 form-factor. The SubZero M.2 XL aluminum heatsink is shipped with two...
16 by Anton Shilov on 12/3/2019Intel Releases SSD 665p: Second-Gen QLC
Two months after being announced, the Intel SSD 665p is set to be released today. The 665p is the successor to the 660p, the most (only?) successful consumer SSD...
28 by Billy Tallis on 11/25/2019Biostar Launches M700 SSDs: Entry-Level PCIe SSDs
After entering the SSD market a couple of years ago, Biostar has been playing things cautiously, only offering low-cost SATA drives. But as the prices of PCIe SSD controllers...
12 by Anton Shilov on 11/22/2019SK Hynix Sampling 128-layer 3D NAND SSDs
SK Hynix announced this week that they have started sampling products based on their 128-layer 3D NAND flash memory, which will soon start showing up in end-user devices. A...
9 by Billy Tallis & Anton Shilov on 11/21/2019The SK Hynix Gold S31 SATA SSD Review: Hynix 3D NAND Finally Shows Up
SK Hynix has been in the NAND and SSD business for a long time, but we haven't had the opportunity to review a drive with SK Hynix NAND in...
22 by Billy Tallis on 11/13/2019OWC Envoy Pro EX Thunderbolt 3 and Plugable TBT3-NVME2TB Portable SSDs Review
Portable SSDs with NVMe-based internal drives and a Thunderbolt 3 interface are the fastest bus-powered storage devices currently available in the market. We have been following this market since...
20 by Ganesh T S on 11/12/2019Seagate Announces FireCuda 520 PCIe 4.0 SSD
Seagate is refreshing their consumer SSD lineup with 96-layer 3D NAND, and introducing a new flagship model: the FireCuda 520, Seagate's first PCIe 4.0 SSD. As with every other...
16 by Billy Tallis on 11/12/2019Western Digital Ultrastar DC SS540 SAS SSDs: Up to 15.36 TB, Up to 3 DWPD
Western Digital has introduced its new series of SSDs designed for mission critical applications, including OLTP, OLAP, hyper converged infrastructure (HCI), as well as software-defined storage (SDS) workloads. The...
21 by Anton Shilov on 11/6/2019Western Digital Begins Shipments of 96-Layer 3D QLC-Based SSDs, Retail Products
Western Digital announced this week that it has started shipments of its first products based on 3D QLC NAND memory. The initial devices to use the highly-dense flash memory...
28 by Anton Shilov on 11/1/2019Western Digital Launches WD Red SA500 Caching SSDs for NAS
Western Digital has introduced its new WD Red SA500 family of specialized SSDs, which are designed for caching data in NAS devices. The drives are available in four different...
27 by Anton Shilov on 10/31/2019Cray Unveils ClusterStor E1000 Storage Arrays: HDDs and SSDs, 1.6 TB/s per Rack
Cray on Wednesday introduced its new ClusterStor E1000 highly-scalable storage system, which is designed for next generation exascale supercomputers as well as future datacenters that will require massive storage...
11 by Anton Shilov on 10/30/2019Crucial Introduces X8 Portable SSD
Micron's consumer brand Crucial is entering the portable SSD market with the new Crucial X8 Portable SSD. The X8 has a USB-C 10Gb/s (USB 3.1 Gen 2) connection and...
7 by Billy Tallis on 10/24/2019Micron Finally Announces A 3D XPoint Product: Micron X100 NVMe SSD
Micron and Intel co-developed 3D XPoint memory as a high-performance alternative to flash, but so far only Intel has brought products to market, under their Optane brand. Despite owning...
30 by Billy Tallis on 10/24/2019Micron Announces 5300 And 7300 Series Enterprise SSDs
Among several announcements today, Micron is updating two families of enterprise/datacenter SSDs to use their latest 96-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory. SATA Update The new 5300 series SATA drives are...
2 by Billy Tallis on 10/24/2019The Toshiba/Kioxia BG4 1TB SSD Review: A Look At Your Next Laptop's SSD
Today we're taking a look at Toshiba's tiny, OEM-only BG4 SSD. The BG4 is going to become an increasingly common sight in OEM laptops as manufacturers look to save...
31 by Billy Tallis on 10/18/2019Team Group Joins PCIe 4.0 SSD Race with Cardea Zero Z440 Drives
The rollout of AMD’s PCIe 4.0 Ryzen platform has accelerated releases of PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD drives. Team Group this week introduced its versions of SSDs based on Phison’s...
28 by Anton Shilov on 10/9/2019