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...
Seagate Introduces AMD EPYC-Based Exos Application Platform: Up To 1.344PB in 5U
Seagate's Application Platform (AP) series of servers have targeted the market segments requiring tightly coupled storage and compute capabilities. The currently available SKUs - The Exos AP series with...
5 by Ganesh T S on 12/14/2021Western Digital Spills Beans on HDD Plans: 30TB HDDs Planned, MAMR's Future Unclear
Western Digital this week said that its energy-assisted magnetic recording (ePMR) and OptiNAND technologies coupled with increased number of platters per hard drive would enable it to build HDDs...
41 by Anton Shilov on 12/2/2021Kioxia Updates M.2 2230 SSD Lineup With BG5 Series: Adding PCIe 4.0 and BiCS5 NAND
Kioxia this morning is updating their BG series of M.2 2230 SSDs for OEMs with the addition of the new BG5 family of drives. The latest in the company’s...
8 by Ryan Smith on 11/15/2021Kingston XS2000 Portable SSDs Review: USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Goes Mainstream
Flash-based portable drives have become popular fast storage options for both content creators and backups-seeking consumers. The advent of high-speed interfaces such as USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps...
19 by Ganesh T S on 11/10/2021OWC Envoy Pro Elektron Rugged IP67 Portable SSD Review
The market for portable SSDs has expanded significantly over the past few years. With USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) becoming the de-facto standard for USB ports even in...
2 by Ganesh T S on 10/29/2021Kingston KC3000 PCIe 4.0 NVMe Flagship SSD Hits Retail
Kingston had previewed their 2021 flagship PCIe 4.0 x 4 M.2 NVMe SSD (codename "Ghost Tree") at CES earlier this year. Not much was divulged other than the use...
9 by Ganesh T S on 10/25/2021SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE SSD and ArmorLock SSD Review
Western Digital introduced the SanDisk Professional branding in May 2021 for its G-Technology products targeting the content-capture market. The company has taken the opportunity to update some of the...
6 by Ganesh T S on 10/12/2021Seagate Updates Game Drive SSD for Xbox with New Look and Internals
Seagate has been maintaining a line of Xbox-certified external SSDs since late 2016. The current Game Drive for Xbox SSD is based on the Seagate Fast SSD's internals and...
19 by Ganesh T S on 10/7/2021Western Digital Updates WD Blue Series with SN570 DRAM-less NVMe SSD
Western Digital is unveiling its latest addition to the WD Blue family today - the SN570 NVMe SSD. A DRAM-less PCIe 3.0 x4 drive, it brings in performance improvements...
21 by Ganesh T S on 10/4/2021Kingston DataTraveler Max UFD Review: NVMe Performance in a USB Thumb Drive
Rapid advancements in flash technology and continued improvements in high-speed interfaces have driven the growth of small, bus-powered portable SSDs. Kingston introduced the DataTraveler Max in August 2021 as...
12 by Ganesh T S on 9/30/2021Western Digital Introduces WD Red SN700: PCIe 3.0 M.2 NVMe SSDs for NAS Systems
Western Digital's Red series of drives for network-attached storage systems has a significant share in various NAS market segments. The series started off with a focus on hard drives...
24 by Ganesh T S on 9/28/2021Akasa M.2 SSD Enclosures Reviewed: Giving Spare Drives a New Lease of Life
The internal storage device market segment has seen rapid evolution over the last decade after the introduction of flash-based disk drives. Beginning with 2.5-inch SSDs in early 2010s, the...
15 by Ganesh T S on 9/22/2021Seagate Introduces IronWolf 525 PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSDs for NAS Systems
Seagate's IronWolf series of drives for network-attached storage systems has gained significant traction in its market segments. One of the primary reasons has been the breadth of offerings -...
9 by Ganesh T S on 9/21/2021USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Portable SSDs Go Native: The Silicon Motion SM2320 UFD Controller Preview
The external storage market has experienced rapid growth over the last few years, particularly in the retail consumer segment. It has been fueled in part by advancements in bus-powered...
18 by Ganesh T S on 9/16/2021Next Gen NVMe SD Card Review: The SM2708 Controller Serves it Hot and Fast
Flash-based removable media has a host of use cases in products ranging from content capture devices to portable game consoles. Behind the standards of these is the SD Association...
43 by Ganesh T S on 9/9/2021Western Digital Reimagines HDD - Flash Integration with OptiNAND
The last few years have seen plenty of new innovations come up in the hard-disk drive market. For quite some time, the HDD technology roadmap was shared industry-wide -...
51 by Ganesh T S on 8/31/2021Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSD Review: RGB-Infused USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Storage
The gaming market has experienced significant growth over the last decade. In addition to boosting PC sales, the peripherals market associated with the segment has also expanded. Installed sizes...
17 by Ganesh T S on 8/27/2021SanDisk Extreme PRO and Crucial X6 4TB Portable SSDs Review: Contrasting High-Capacity Storage Options
The portable SSD market has been steadily expanding thanks to the increasing digital footprint of consumers. Technological advancements such as 3D NAND with high layer counts and the emergence...
20 by Ganesh T S on 8/18/2021SK Hynix Releases 2TB Version of Gold P31 NVMe SSD
Coming off of the popular reception of their first family of retail NVMe SSDs, SK hynix this morning is adding another model to the Gold P31 family: the long-awaited...
32 by Ryan Smith on 8/17/2021Silverstone MS12 and Yottamaster HC2-C3 USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20Gbps Enclosures Reviewed
Late last year, we took stock of the the state of the USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 ecosystem. It was not a rosy outlook at that time. But since then...
21 by Ganesh T S on 8/12/2021