Storage News - Page 2

Sabrent has just refreshed its Rocket 4 Gen4 SSD family with new DRAM-less, single-sided SSDs in both 1TB and 2TB capacities, with the 4TB model coming soon.

The new Sabrent Rocket 4 Gen4 SSDs have some new toys to play with inside: Phison's new PS5027-E27T DRAMless 4-channel SSD controller and Kioxia's BiCS6 2400MT flash array. This means that Sabrent ships its new Rocket 4 SSD with no on-board DRAM, half the channels of its PCIe Gen4 flagship predecessors, and in the words of our Storage God Jon Coulter, this "power-sipping single-sided masterpiece is overall the best performing PCIe Gen4 SSD Sabrent has ever delivered. Impressive".

The full potential of PCIe 4.0 technology can be realized with a single-sided SSD that doesn't put out much heat, making it the perfect super-fast Gen4 SSD for your PC, laptop, or PlayStation 5 console. We're looking at up to 7.4GB/sec (7400MB/sec) reads and up to 6.4GB/sec (6400MB/sec) writes, while up to 1000K/950K random IOPs. As Sabrent says, why compromise when you can have it all?

With a maximum transfer speed of 2,000 MB/s, TEAMGROUP's new CinemaPr P31 Portable External SSD is designed for professional photographers and videographers - with the ability to record directly to the drive when connected to a compatible DSLR camera or smartphone. It's the first product in TEAMGROUP's T-CREATE CinemaPr series of products for creators.

According to the announcement, the CinemaPr P31 Portable External SSD was "designed specifically for filming," with 4TB capacity models able to store roughly 400 minutes (under 7 hours) of raw 8K video files. Of course, you can store Full HD, 4K, and even 6K on the CinemaPr P31 Portable External SSD - which is also compatible with iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max for recording.

Naturally, this means the new SSD is designed for portability and durability, with a lightweight 97-gram aluminum alloy build that is IP67 waterproof and dustproof certified. TEAMGROUP's patented graphene cooling handles cooling.

Sabrent is the hero of storage on World Backup Day, offering everyone up to 33% off its storage-related products. Grab your World Backup Day bargains from Sabrent here.

The storage leader explains on its website that in honor of World Backup Day, Sabrent is here to "ensure your digital life is not only secure but thriving. As our way of celebrating, we're offering exclusive discounts on our top-tier storage solutions, designed to keep your data safe".

We've got products like the Sabrent Rocket nano XTRM Thunderbolt 3 external SSD for $130, down from $170, while the 5-Bay USB-C Docking Station for 2.5-inch SATA HDDs and SSDs drops from $150 to just $99. If you're after a USB Type-C to Dual 3.5-inch SATA and RAID Docking Station, that's dropped by $30 to $120, down from $150.

MSI has released a new blazing-fast SSD which benefits from a seriously beefy cooling solution to allow it to reach extremely speedy read and write speeds.

How fast? The Spatium M580 FROZR is a PCIe 5.0 SSD which hits read speeds of up to 14.6GB/s and write speeds of up to 12.7GB/s, so yes, this is very, very quick.

The cooler is a passive tower heatsink sporting three heat pipes, with MSI noting that it reduces temps by up to 20 degrees Celsius, allowing for sustained throughput at the high-performing levels which the drive is capable of.

Phison had something very cool to show off at NVIDIA GTC 2024 last week, with a single MAINGEAR PRO AI workstation PC packing 4 x NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada workstation GPUs using its in-house aiDaptiv+ software to use SSDs and DRAM to make up for the lack of VRAM, using it to super-speed AI workloads on the cheap.

By cheap, we mean cheaper than using full-fledged NVIDIA Hopper H100 or new H200 AI GPUs, let alone the next-gen Blackwell B100 and B200 AI GPUs that will be very hard to come by this year, and a huge chunk into 2025. Phison's aim with its aiDaptiv+ platform is to lower the (cost) barrier of AI LLM training by using systems' already-there DRAM and SSDs to augment the amount of GPU VRAM available for AI training.

Phison says that achieving intense generative AI training workloads at a far lower cost than using standard GPUs will come at a cost: reduced AI training performance and longer training times. If you want the best, you'll spend magnitudes more money on it, but more off-the-shelf AI systems from the likes of MAINGEAR and its PRO AI system, putting Phison's new aiDaptiv+ platform in between is a big win.

Yingren has just announced their new YRS820 Gen5 SSD controller, which is based on the RISC-V architecture, offers 14GB/sec+ reads, and it's done with a fanless design.

The Chinese firm has some of the fastest SSD controllers on the planet, but most people haven't heard about Yingren, which has its InnoGrit IG5666 SSD controller made on the 12nm process node inside of TEAMGROUP's T-Force GE PRO PCIe Gen5 SSDs.

Yingren is pumping AI into its new Gen5 SSD, with artificial intelligence helping out its new YRS820 Gen5 SSD controller. In a recent demonstration of its new SSD controller, Yingred showed off an impressive 14.2GB/sec (14,200MB/sec) sequential reads, and up to 12GB/sec (12,000MB/sec) sequential writes, all with a fanless design.

We will soon be living in a world where you'll own nothing -- an SSD -- and be happy, with Samsung to show off its new server-class SSD "subscription" model called PBSSD.

PBSSD is a petabyte-level SSD solution that will launch with a subscription model in the US in Q2 2024, to "address the era of ultra-high-capacity data". A Samsung statement that was probably sourced from leaked materials on PBSSD, reads: "the subscription service will help reduce initial investment costs in storage infrastructure for our customers and cut down on maintenance expenses".

Once an enterprise customer agrees, they're not expected to purchase ultra-high-capacity SSDs outright, where they can use "the service can flexibly utilize SSD storage without the need to build separate infrastructure, while simultaneously receiving various services from Samsung Electronics related to storage management, security, and upgrades". Interesting.

Sabrent's new rocket-fueled SSD, the Rocket 5 SSD, is now available on Amazon in 1TB, 2TB, and monster 4TB capacities.

The new Sabrent Rocket 5 SSD starts at $189 for the 1TB version, while the 2TB will set you back $339, and if you want the biggest 4TB capacity, you'll be looking at $729. You'll want a Gen5-capable motherboard to enjoy those wicked-fast 14GB/sec read speeds... and you won't need some gigantic heatsink to enjoy those huge speeds, either.

Sabrent's new Rocket 5 SSD is a benchmark chart destroyer, ushering in a new era of speed for gamers, content creators, and everyone in between. Our Storage Review Jon Coulter has already looked at the 2TB and 4TB versions of Sabrent's new Rocket 5 SSD, which you can check out in the links below. If you've just built or are about to build a high-end rig and don't know which M.2 SSD to purchase... this is the one.

A group of researchers have created a new type of optical storage device that is the same shape as a DVD or Blu-Ray disc but is capable of storing an incredible amount of data.

With the rise of streaming services, Blu-Ray and DVD purchases have fallen off a cliff, with purchases for both primarily being done by collectors or hard-core fans of that specific media. However, that may change if researchers from the University of Shanghai have anything to say about it as they have created a new optical disc that is capable of holding 1.6 petabits, or around 200,000 gigabytes, which is enough capacity to store more than 40,000 DVD movies or just over 200,000 Blu-Ray movies.

IEEE Spectrum reports the new disc has a capacity that is around 4,000 times the data density of a Blu-Ray, which is approximately 24 times the capacity of a typical hard drive. Typical optical disc drives, while being relatively cheap to manufacture, are limited by their low data capacity, which can be traced by to the technique manufacturers use to make data storage possible. IEEE Spectrum explains data on optical discs is usually stored in a single layer, but now scientists have cracked the code with a new technique that allows data encoding on 100 layers.

IBM just published a new blog detailing the technology inside of its AI-protected SSDs, with its fourth-generation FlashCore Module (FCM) technology and its latest FCM4 revision supporting AI.

The AI-assisted SSDs from IBM will detect and respond to cybersecurity threats in real-time, magnitudes faster than a professional, or even a team of professionals. IBM's previous-gen FCM can scan all incoming data without performance degradation, but they didn't feature AI.

FCM4 is capable of monitoring statistics for each and every I/O operation; powered by machine learning, it'll detect threats like ransomware in less than 30 seconds. IBM Storage Insights software will alert users to any issues on their system, with FCM4-powered AI-boosted SSDs taking in real-time I/O data with machine learning models that will determine threats.