Storage News - Page 44

CES 2018 - At CES 2018, we spotted an Intel Optane drive discretely placed in the M.2 slot of an ASUS motherboard. While neither Intel nor ASUS was willing to discuss specifications with us, we were allowed to take a snap of the drive, hinting that release is imminent.

When Intel initially released their Optane SSDs, they were meant to be used as system accelerators working with hard drives and predictive software to enhance user experience at an introductory level. Intel wanted to give consumers the option to use Optane+HDD rather than a full-blown SSD. However, many people wanted Optane as a system drive.

The SSD is perfect for small file workloads, but with only 16GB and 32GB variants launched, most people were not able to use them as standalone drives. While you can currently find Intel's 900p series Optane drives in larger sizes, they only exist in the U.2 or add-in-card (AIC) form factors and are very expensive.

CES 2018 - ASRock was teasing their new Ultra Quad M.2 Card at CES 2018, with their new card capable of housing 4 x NMVe M.2 SSDs, cooled by a 50mm centrifugal fan.

The company is comparing it against the ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 card, with ASRock's new card featuring a bigger fan, and 6-pin PCIe power connector. ASRock also mounts the M.2 SSDs angled from the bottom, which also looks awesome, now we just need RGBs.

ASRock says that the angled placement of the M.2 sockets is better, as it minimizes the trace distance from the M.2 slots to the PCIe slot.

Toshiba have announced the addition to their XG5 SSD lineup that is based its 64-layer, 3D BiCS FLASH memory, the new XG5-P. The latest member of the XG5 lineup is designed with the ever-expanding demands of high-end PC, gaming and content delivery thanks to its capacity of up to 2TB and improved random read/write performance of up to 55 percent over standard XG5 SSDs.

"Toshiba recognizes the need for engineering larger capacity, higher performance SSD solutions that target specific applications and use cases," said, Neville Ichhaporia, director of client and data center SSD marketing at TMA. "With our latest flagship XG5-P series, we have once again raised the bar in client SSD storage by delivering NVMe SSDs that take workstation, gaming and content creation performance to the next level."

Featuring a PCI Express Gen3 x4 lane and NVMe Revision 1.2.1 interface, this allows the XG5-P to provide up to 3000 MB/sec of sequential read and 2200 MB/sec of sequential write and up to 320,000 random read and 265,000 random write IOPS6, not bad Toshiba, not bad at all.

Toshiba have been busy in regards to their high-end storage range, with recently announcing a 10TB HDD dedicated for surveillance applications and their new XG5-P SSD. For all those NAS enthusiasts out there, Toshiba haven't forgotten about you and have released the MN06ACA10T, a 10TB hard drive in a 3.5" form factor.

"Our new 10TB MN06 Series provides excellent NAS-class performance and durability," said Scott Wright, Director of HDD Product Marketing at Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. "Our exclusive conventional mechanics delivers real value to work-groups and cloud storage architects who utilize established network-attached storage technologies. The MN06ACA10T 10TB includes RV compensation technology for optimal performance in multi-drive NAS enclosures and is designed for 24/7 operation."

The MN06AC10T sees a 25% increase in regards to capacity and double the buffer size (256MiB) over its predecessor, the MN05ACA800. Toshiba's dedicated NAS HDD is designed for 24/7 operation and an annual workload of an impressive 180TB transferred. MTTF of 1,000,000 hours, and 300,000 load/unload cycles.

Toshiba today announced that it's begun sampling UFS storage based on its high-end 64-layer 3D VNAND memory.

Toshiba's new UFS 3D storage lineup has four capacities including 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and 256GB, with all of the drives featuring both flash memory and a controller--which manages the drives health--in a standard JEDEC form factor.

The flash drives potentially have a total theoretical interface speed of up to 11.6Gbps, and the sequential read and write speeds of the 64GB option are 900MB/sec and 180MB/sec respectively. Toshiba boasts that the random read and write performance of the new lineup is about 200% and 180% respectively better than previous gen drives.

Toshiba has just announced their latest surveillance HDD, with the new MD06ACA-V being the latest in a growing line of SV Series 3.5-inch HDDs that Toshiba makes for surveillance applications.

The new models arrive in up to 10TB, and thanks to higher transfer rates over the MD04ABA-V models, Toshiba says the new drives support up to 64 camera streams. The larger capacity HDDs mixed with the higher speeds on the drive will allow higher resolution surveillance with long-term storage thanks to 10TB models.

Toshiba's new MD06ACA-V is designed for 24/7 streaming operation scenarios like surveillance digital video recorders (SDVR), surveillance network video recorders (SNVR) and Hybrid SDVR. Toshiba taps 7200RPM operation for the new drives, with the 10TB model offering a 58% increase in maximum sustained transfer rates over its predecessor.

There's a new line of SSD's about to hit the market from COLORFUL, the new PLUS Series SSD. The COLORFUL Plus Series SSD combines the latest in 3D TLC NAND Flash technology and a new SMI SM2258XT controller that is able to deliver up to 640GB capacity and deliver some great results that we've come to expect from COLORFUL.

COLORFUL have utilized 3D TLC NAND Flash technology for the Plus Series SSD that has enabled the hardware giants to deliver bigger capacities whilst maintaining long lifespans of the SSD. Backed with BGA NAND Flash, the performance and stability of the SSD is also ensured. Combined with developments in 3D NAND technology, this has enabled new 3D NAND Flash specifications that produce non-standard capacities for the Plus Series SSD, this explains the slightly increased capacities of 160GB, 320GB and 640GB.

Below are benchmarks of the 640GB variant, the SL500.

Silicon Power have added the A75 portable hard drive to their Armor series, this follows their recent release of the impressive Armor A62 portable hard drive. The Armor A75 is finished in a beautiful aviation-grade aluminium, crowning this slim-portable hard drive the world's thinnest hard drive in its category.

To say the A75 is slim is an understatement, the A75 measures 124.4 x 82 x 12.2mm in size, weighs only 169g and is shockproof up to 1.22m. Unfortunately, Silicon Power's latest portable hard drive is only available in 1 and 2 TB variants, but the gorgeous exterior of the A75 more than makes up for the limited capacity when compared to the A62. Other features include USB 3.1 Gen 1, Free SP Widget software and a slim "L" shaped LED status light that can be seen from top and front view.

Samsung Electronics today announced its third quarter earnings results, affirming that the supply situation for key NAND products will tighten into Q4 and possibly beyond.

The financials note that Samsung will continue focusing its memory business more towards higher-end performance chips such as VNAND storage and LPDDR4X memory to serve the increasingly demanding needs of the mobile and datacenter markets. As a result of this shift away from traditional 2D NAND, supply will remain constrained for key products such as Nintendo's new Switch handheld-console hybrid, which uses traditional storage memory.

"Looking ahead to the fourth quarter, the company anticipates tight supply and demand conditions to continue for the Memory Business due to strong demand for servers and mobile devices. For the Memory Business, demand for high-density, high-performance NAND will increase, as the need for larger data capacity in servers and mobile devices grows," the report states.

Seagate have introduced the first HDD created specifically for artificial intelligence enabled video surveillance, the Seagate SkyHawk AI hard disk drive. Building on Seagate's 10-year track record of optimized surveillance performance, The SkyHawk AI provides unparalleled bandwidth and processing power for data-intensive workloads, with the ability to simultaneously analyze and record footage from multiple HD cameras.

"The use of AI technology in surveillance is steadily increasing - both in the edge and backend installations such as retail fronts and large city traffic management. Seagate has led the surveillance storage market since its early days, a decade ago, by delivering industry leading HDD products that have enabled more than 5X increase in exabytes during this time period," said Sai Varanasi, vice president product line management at Seagate Technology. "We are excited to introduce smart, purpose-built SkyHawk AI solutions that expand the design space for our customers and partners, allowing them to implement next-generation deep learning and video analytics applications."

With forecasted growth from 27.6 million shipments in 2016 for video surveillance hardware, to 126 million in 2021, Seagate are providing the ideal solution for computational workloads that typically accompany AI work streams. SkyHawk AI can provide high throughput and enhanced caching to deliver low latency and excellent random read performance.