Storage
Seagate on Wednesday introduced its Exos X24 family of hard drives, it's highest capacity series of drives to date. The new family is comprised of both conventional magnetic recording technology (CMR) and shingled magnetic recording (SMR) models, with the CMR drive topping out at 24 TB, while SMR brings the peak capacity up to 28 TB. Both are, as of now, the highest-capacity HDDs in their respective segments. But perhaps the most important technological development with the Exos X24 lineup is that it uses a platform that will be largely re-used for the upcoming HAMR drives. The Seagate Exos X24 3.5-inch helium-filled hard drive family includes 12 TB, 16 TB, 20 TB, and 24 TB models, which are built using up to 10 2.4 TB...
Samsung Updates PRO Plus UHS-I Memory Cards with Improved Speeds
Samsung has been marketing SD and microSD cards for a few years now under the PRO Plus lineup in the UHS-I category. We looked at the 2020 lineup in...
26 by Ganesh T S on 4/11/2023Kioxia and Western Digital Debut 218-Layer 3D NAND: 1Tb TLC with 3.2 GT/s IO Speed
Kioxia and Western Digital formally introduced their 8th Generation BiCS 3D NAND memory with 218 active layers. The new storage device offers a 1Tb capacity in 3D TLC mode...
34 by Anton Shilov on 3/31/2023Crucial Preps T700 PCIe 5.0 SSD With Write Speeds Up To 12.4 GB/s
Crucial has started to tease the T700, the company's first mainstream PCIe 5.0 SSD. Not to be confused with the Terminator T-700, the T700's product page has already gone...
28 by Zhiye Liu on 3/23/2023NAND Flash Prices Have Dropped Rapidly In Recent Quarters - And So Have SSD Prices
Softened demand for PCs and smartphones coupled with NAND memory bits oversupply has sent prices of 3D NAND memory into a dive in recent quarters. In Q4, global NAND...
20 by Anton Shilov on 3/20/2023Apex Storage X21 Carries 21 M.2 SSDs: 168 TB of NAND at up to 31 GB/second
Riser cards carrying multiple M.2-2280 SSDs are nothing new, but Apex Storage went above and beyond with its new X21 board, which can carry up to 21 M.2 drives...
9 by Anton Shilov on 3/15/2023Dropbox Shares Preparations for HAMR Hard Drives, Focusing On Reducing Drive Vibrations
Dropbox was among the first large cloud service providers (CSPs) providers to deploy hard drives that use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) to increase storage density of its datacenters. As...
4 by Anton Shilov on 3/13/2023First PCIe Gen5 SSDs Finally Hit Shelves - But The Best Is Yet To Come
This week, consumer-grade PCIe 5.0 M.2 drives have finally hit the U.S. market, well over a year since the first client PC platforms supporting PCIe Gen5 became available. The...
29 by Anton Shilov on 3/3/2023OWC Envoy Pro Mini Review: SSD in a Thumb Drive Exceeds Expectations
OWC has been a key player in the storage industry over the last few decades, particularly for Apple users. Their lineup of portable flash-based direct-attached storage devices has a...
19 by Ganesh T S on 3/2/2023Silicon Motion SM2268XT DRAM-less NVMe SSD Controller: PCIe 4.0 Speeds on a Budget
The excitement in the client SSD space recently has understandably been on the Gen 5 front. However, cooling requirements have made it difficult for vendors to bring effective M.2...
17 by Ganesh T S on 2/16/2023Western Digital Launches 22 TB HDD for Consumers in Updated My Book Portfolio
Western Digital's 22 TB hard disk drives hit retail in July 2022, with a trio of products catering to the prosumer and business / enterprise markets. Today, the company...
13 by Ganesh T S on 2/15/2023Western Digital Unveils Dual Actuator Ultrastar DC HS760 20TB HDD
Without much fanfare, Western Digital this week introduced its first dual actuator hard drive, a 20TB drive that is designed to offer SATA SSD-like sequential read/write performance. The Ultrastar...
35 by Anton Shilov on 2/1/2023Samsung Portable SSD T7 Shield 4TB Review: IP65 PSSD Gets a Capacity Upgrade
Samsung has been enjoying market success with their lineup of portable SSDs, starting with the T1 back in 2015. The company has been regularly updating their PSSD lineup with...
13 by Ganesh T S on 1/31/2023Seagate Confirms 30TB+ HAMR HDDs in Q3, Envisions 50TB Drives in a Few Years
Seagate this week confirmed plans to launch the industry's first 30+ TB hard drive that uses its heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, as well as reaffirming its commitment...
70 by Anton Shilov on 1/27/2023Micron Launches 9400 NVMe Series: U.3 SSDs for Data Center Workloads
Micron is taking the wraps off their latest data center SSD offering today. The 9400 NVMe Series builds upon Micron's success with their third-generation 9300 series introduced back in...
18 by Ganesh T S on 1/9/2023WD_BLACK P40 Game Drive USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Portable SSD Review: Balanced Storage
Western Digital had announced new products in the WD_BLACK lineup back in May 2022 to augment their offerings in the gaming market. The WD_BLACK P40 Game Drive SSD was...
6 by Ganesh T S on 11/18/2022Best Internal Hard Drives: Holiday 2022
Data storage requirements have kept increasing over the last several years. While SSDs have taken over the role of the primary drive in most computing systems, hard drives continue...
44 by Ganesh T S on 11/4/2022SanDisk Professional PRO-G40 Thunderbolt / USB Dual-Mode Portable SSD Review
Western Digital is introducing a new flagship portable SSD today under the SanDisk Professional brand. The PRO-G40 dual-mode PSSD ticks all the right boxes for prosumers, content creators, and...
13 by Ganesh T S on 10/6/2022SK hynix Announces 238 Layer NAND - Mass Production To Start In H1'2023
As the 2022 Flash Memory Summit continues, SK hynix is the latest vendor to announce their next generation of NAND flash memory at the show. Showcasing for the first...
9 by Ryan Smith on 8/4/2022Solidigm Announces P41 Plus SSD: Taking Another Shot at QLC With Cache Tiering
Although Intel is no longer directly in the SSD market these days, their SSD team and related technologies continue to live on under the SK hynix umbrella as Solidigm...
44 by Ryan Smith on 8/2/2022Compute Express Link (CXL) 3.0 Announced: Doubled Speeds and Flexible Fabrics
While it’s technically still the new kid on the block, the Compute Express Link (CXL) standard for host-to-device connectivity has quickly taken hold in the server market. Designed to...
4 by Ryan Smith on 8/2/2022