Storage
Nowadays highest-capacity hard drives are typically aimed at cloud service providers (CSPs) and enterprises, but this does not mean that creative professionals or regular users do not need them. To cater to demands of more regular consumers, Western Digital has started shipments of its Red Pro 24 TB HDDs, which are aimed at high-end NAS use for creative professionals with significant storage requirements. Western Digital's Red Pro 24 TB hard drives come approximately 20 months after their 22 TB model hit retail in 2022, offering an incremental improvement to WD's highest-capacity NAS and consumer hard drive offering. The platform uses conventional magnetic recording (CMR), feature a 7200 RPM rotating speed, are equipped with a 512 MB cache, and use OptiNAND technology to improve reliability as...
Western Digital Roadmap Updates: Energy Assisted Recording, Multi-Stage Actuators, Zoned Storage
Between CES at the beginning of the month, a series of presentations at Storage Field Day last week and a quarterly earnings report this week, we've heard from just...
115 by Billy Tallis on 1/31/2020Faster, Cheaper, Power Efficient UFS Storage: UFS 3.1 Spec Published
JEDEC has published its UFS 3.1 specification (aka JESD220E), which adds several performance, power, cost-cutting, and reliability-related features to the standard. The new capabilities promise to increase real-world device...
11 by Anton Shilov on 1/31/2020Western Digital and Kioxia Announce BiCS5 112-Layer 3D NAND
Western Digital and Kioxia have announced the successful development of their newest generation of 3D NAND flash memory. Their fifth-generation BiCS 3D NAND has commenced production in the form...
19 by Billy Tallis on 1/30/2020Enmotus MiDrive: Rethinking SLC Caching For QLC SSDs
For consumer storage, CES 2020 brought a new wave of competition for PCIe 4.0 SSDs and promise of faster portable SSDs, but the most intriguing product demo was from...
44 by Billy Tallis on 1/30/2020QNAP Launches Two Bay TS-251D NAS: Gemini Lake, HDMI, PCIe Expandability
QNAP has announced its new budget-friendly two-bay NAS aimed at home users and supporting hardware-accelerated media playback. The TS-251D can store up to 32 TB of data using today’s...
14 by Anton Shilov on 1/27/2020USB 3.2 Gen 2 Portable SSDs Roundup - Featuring the Samsung T7 Touch and the SanDisk Extreme Pro
External bus-powered storage devices have grown in storage capacity as well as speeds over the last decade. Palm-sized flash-based storage devices with a Thunderbolt 3 interface are capable of...
38 by Ganesh T S on 1/23/2020TerraMaster Reveals TD2 Thunderbolt 3 DAS: 2 Bays For 32 TB
TerraMaster has unveiled a new entry-level Thunderbolt 3 DAS, the aptly named TD2 Thunderbolt 3, which is aimed at video professionals who need a relatively small storage device that...
11 by Anton Shilov on 1/22/2020CES 2020: TerraMaster Shows Off 5-Bay F5-422 NAS with 10 Gb Ethernet
TerraMaster unveiled a new five-bay NAS with a 10 GbE connectivity at this year's CES. The F5-422 is based upon Intel Apollo Lake SoC, and runs the company’s TOS...
33 by Anton Shilov on 1/17/2020Asustor, QNAP, and Synology Introduce New NAS Units at CES 2020
The network-attached storage (NAS) vendors had a relatively quiet presence at CES 2020 compared to what we used to see in earlier years. We have a few announcements and...
65 by Ganesh T S on 1/10/2020CES 2020: Patriot Demonstrates PXD External SSD w/ USB-C
Among the many storage vendors at this year's CES was Patriot, who was showcasing its upcoming PXD external SSD. The device features a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C interface...
5 by Anton Shilov on 1/9/2020ASUS Going Fast: Quad PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD Storage Add-in Card Hyper M.2
One of the driving features of performance in the high-end desktop space is the creator community: the need for fast CPUs and fast storage is strong, regardless of cost...
19 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 1/9/2020Seagate Demonstrates HAMR and Dual-Actuator Hard Drives in the Lyve Drive Mobile System
Seagate had two major announcements at CES 2020 - one featuring updates to their lineup of external storage devices, and the other related to a modular storage system with...
26 by Ganesh T S on 1/8/2020Samsung Launches Portable SSD T7 Touch with Fingerprint Security
Samsung's mass-market external drive, the Portable SSD T-series, was last updated in August 2017 with the introduction of the T5 with 64-layer V-NAND. The Portable SSD T5 came with...
8 by Ganesh T S on 1/8/2020Western Digital Demonstrates 8TB Portable 20 Gbps SSD, Announces Dual-Connector 1TB Thumb Drive
Western Digital has a history of showcasing cutting-edge technological advancements in the consumer electronics space at CES every year. In 2019, a 4TB thumb drive was demonstrated, and this...
12 by Ganesh T S on 1/6/2020Seagate Expands External Flash Storage Lineup with FireCuda Gaming SSD and BarraCuda Fast SSD
Late last year, Seagate had launched the FireCuda Gaming Dock, a 4TB external hard drive / Thunderbolt 3 dock with a Titan Ridge controller. It stood out in the...
13 by Ganesh T S on 1/6/2020AnandTech Year In Review 2019: Solid State Drives
In 2019, flash memory prices have leveled out and have even crept back upward a bit, and new technologies have been slow to roll out, although we are currently...
42 by Billy Tallis on 12/31/2019Kioxia: 3D Stacked Storage Class Memory, like 3D XPoint, Isn’t the Future
One of the key battlegrounds of the next decade is going to be storage: density, speed, and demand. Naturally all the major players in the space want to promote...
23 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 12/30/2019OWC Releases Accelsior 4M2 SSD: Quad-M.2 For Over 6000 MB/s
Just in time for the launch of Apple's newly redesigned Mac Pro tower, OWC has introduced the ‘fastest SSD [they've] ever built’, the Accelsior 4M2. The high-end solid state...
24 by Anton Shilov on 12/23/2019Western Digital Begins to Sample 18 TB & 20 TB ‘Energy Assisted’ Hard Drives
Western Digital has started partner sampling of its 18 TB and 20 TB energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) drives. The HDDs utilize WD's up and coming EAMR tech to further...
23 by Anton Shilov on 12/23/2019The ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro 1TB SSD Review: Realtek's Entry-level NVMe Solution
Realtek's second-generation NVMe SSD controllers are ready for prime time, and ADATA decided to try them out. The XPG SX6000 Pro is an entry-level DRAMless NVMe SSD with competitive...
36 by Billy Tallis on 12/18/2019