NVMe
Western Digital is unveiling its latest addition to the mainstream WD Blue family today - the SN580 NVMe SSD. A DRAM-less PCIe 4.0 x4 drive, it brings in performance improvements over the current lead product in the line - the SN570 launched in late 2021. This DRAM-less drive is the first PCIe Gen4 SSD in the WD Blue lineup. As a mainstream drive, the WD Blue SN580 is meant for consumer systems requiring quick launches of applications in multitasking scenarios, along with high responsiveness. WD has also optimized the firmware for fast loading of large-sized media assets (a nod towards content creators). Most importantly, the DRAM-less nature and a non-overreaching performance goal (up to 4150 MBps, which is on the low end for a Gen4...
Microchip Announces PCIe 5.0 And CXL Retimers
Microchip is entering the market for PCIe retimer chips with a pair of new retimers supporting PCIe 5.0's 32GT/s link speed. The new XpressConnect RTM-C 8xG5 and 16xG5 chips...
8 by Billy Tallis on 11/11/2020Kioxia Announces XG7 PCIe 4.0 Client SSDs
Last week, Kioxia rounded out their lineup of PCIe 4.0 enterprise and datacenter SSDs with the announcement of the XD6. Now, they're bringing PCIe 4.0 support to their client...
9 by Billy Tallis on 11/9/2020Kioxia Announces XD6 Datacenter SSDs: PCIe 4.0 and EDSFF At Scale
Kioxia (formerly Toshiba Memory) is announcing the new XD6 series datacenter NVMe SSDs, featuring PCIe 4.0 support and using the EDSSF E1.S form factors. The XD6 is Kioxia's first...
10 by Billy Tallis on 11/3/2020Sabrent Rocket Nano Rugged IP67 Portable SSD Review: NVMe in a M.2 2242 Enclosure
Portable bus-powered SSDs are a growing segment of the direct-attached storage market. The ongoing glut in flash memory (and the growing confidence of flash vendors in QLC) has brought...
11 by Ganesh T S on 10/30/2020Crucial Portable SSD X6 and X8 2TB Review: QLC for Storage On-the-Go
Bus-powered portable flash-based storage solutions are one of the growing segments in the consumer-focused direct-attached storage market. The emergence of 3D NAND with TLC and QLC has brought down...
22 by Ganesh T S on 10/21/2020Silicon Motion Launches PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD Controllers
Silicon Motion has announced the official launch of their first generation of PCIe 4.0-capable NVMe SSD controllers. These controllers have been on the roadmap for quite a while and...
23 by Billy Tallis on 10/20/2020Western Digital Launches New WD Black NVMe SSDs And Thunderbolt Dock
Today Western Digital is announcing a major expansion of their WD Black family of gaming-oriented storage products. In a digital event later today on Twitch, Western Digital will introduce...
40 by Billy Tallis on 10/8/2020Marvell and HPE Introduce NVMe RAID Adapter for Server Boot Drives
In 2018 Marvell announced the 88NR2241 Intelligent NVMe Switch: the first—and so far, only—NVMe hardware RAID controller of its kind. Now that chip has scored its first major (public...
29 by Billy Tallis on 10/6/2020SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD v2 and WD My Passport SSD (2020) Review
External bus-powered storage devices have grown both in storage capacity as well as speeds over the last decade. Thanks to rapid advancements in flash technology (including the advent of...
7 by Ganesh T S on 9/30/2020Western Digital Unveils USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 SanDisk Extreme PRO Portable SSD v2
The SanDisk Extreme PRO Portable SSD released in 2019 has been one of the top performers in the external flash storage market segment. Putting a high-end WD Black SN750-class...
14 by Ganesh T S on 9/30/2020The Samsung 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 SSD Review: A Spirit of Hope
It may be a bit later than originally planned, but Samsung's first consumer SSD to support PCIe 4.0 is here. The Samsung 980 PRO was first previewed at CES...
137 by Billy Tallis on 9/22/2020ADATA XPG Launches a PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD for Notebooks: Gammix S50 Lite
One of the primary issues with most of the PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage drives on the market today is power consumption. The only base solution for OEMs in the...
15 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 9/18/2020Western Digital Launches Security Platform for Portable Storage with G-Technology's ArmorLock-Encrypted NVMe SSD
Data safety is of paramount importance for many enterprise use-cases, and in certain scenarios, for home consumers too. Portable storage devices have typically offered data protection in the form...
4 by Ganesh T S on 9/3/2020Samsung 980 PRO Briefly Listed Online
In what seems to be an accidental leak, a product page for the highly-awaited Samsung 980 PRO SSD was posted and later taken down from Samsung's website for Singapore...
78 by Billy Tallis on 8/31/2020The Best NVMe SSD for Laptops and Notebooks: SK hynix Gold P31 1TB SSD Reviewed
SK hynix has entered the consumer NVMe SSD market with a big splash: the new Gold P31 has solid high-end performance, but its power efficiency blows the competition out...
80 by Billy Tallis on 8/27/2020SK Hynix Launches First 128 Layer 3D NAND SSD: Gold P31 NVMe
Last year SK Hynix re-entered the consumer retail SSD market with their Gold S31 SATA SSD. At CES 2020, they previewed a pair of consumer NVMe drives, the first...
20 by Billy Tallis on 8/18/2020Intel Previews 4-Layer 3D XPoint Memory For Second-Generation Optane SSDs
As part of Intel's Architecture Day 2020 presentations, Raja Koduri spent a bit of time talking about the status of their Optane products. Most of it was a recapitulation...
27 by Billy Tallis on 8/13/2020The Next Step in SSD Evolution: NVMe Zoned Namespaces Explained
In June we saw an update to the NVMe standard. The update defines a software interface to assist in actually reading and writing to the drives in a way...
46 by Billy Tallis on 8/6/2020Microchip Announces Flashtec NVMe 3108 PCIe 4.0 Enterprise SSD Controller
Microchip is announcing their first PCIe 4.0-capable SSD controller for low-power and entry-level enterprise SSDs. The new Flashtec NVMe 3108 is the smaller 8-channel derivative of the 16-channel Flashtec...
5 by Billy Tallis on 8/4/2020Memblaze Releases New PBlaze5 520 Series Low-Power Enterprise SSDs
Yesterday we saw Memblaze introducing a new series of low-power server-class NVMe SSDs that focus on providing excellent performance whilst maintaining lower power consumption levels, aiming at enterprises improving...
3 by Andrei Frumusanu on 7/30/2020