Storage News - Page 48

With its new TR200 SSD line, Toshiba is bringing its potent TLC BiCS Flash 3D NAND memory to the retail market for the first time.

Toshiba's new TR200 SSD brand is the first to ship with the company's state of the art 64-layer 3-bit-per-cell TLC BiCS Flash memory, which enables massive power efficiency with 1.6W of power usage and speedy transfers over SATA. The TR200 line will be the only SATA drives Toshiba releases from now onward, and is targeted at first-time upgraders and value-oriented PC gamers and DIY enthusiasts.

The TR200 SSD line can deliver up to 550MB/s reads and 525MB/s write speeds over the 6Gbit/s SATA interface, with 80,000KiB read IOPS and 87,000KiB write IOPS. The line comes in 2.5-inch SATA drives with capacities from 240GB, 480GB and 960GB, and pricing has yet to be announced.

On the back of its major QLC 3D NAND flash breakthrough, Toshiba today announced yet another milestone with the world's first 3D NAND flash memory powered by TSV technology.

Toshiba will leverage TSV (Through Silicon Via) technology to further boost data transfers and lower power consumption of its 3D BiCS VNAND TLC flash memory line. TSV's highly efficient vertical-based technology aligns with the stacked flash memory dies of Toshiba's BiCS flash line. In fact, the Japanese storage titan assets that TSV allows up to 200% more power efficiency of BiCS flash memory outfitted with traditional wire-bonding architecture.

The Tokyo-based company notes that TSV BiCS flash will enabled 1TB storage devices with 16-die stacked architecture in a single package.

Viking Technology has just announced their new Silo Sold State Drive, with two new SSDs arriving in both 25TB and 50TB capacities. 50TB is a new world record for the industry's highest capacity SSD, with the UHC-Silo SSD able to hold years worth of data for high-end datacenter deployment.

The new drives are built with energy efficiency in mind, with idle power consumption of less than 10W, and active power consumption of only 16W... not too damn bad for 50TB of SSD. Viking Technology adds that by increasing the overall storage capacity per rack, while decreasing the power required per TB. Viking's new UHC-Silo SSD will have datacenter customers saving in power, space, and cooling by up to 80% per terabyte.

Jim Handy from Objective Analysis explained: "Some system administrators are looking for a way to extend the useful life of existing hardware, since it may function perfectly but support too little overall capacity,. With ultra-high-capacity SSDs, not only can they reach beyond the capacity limits of enterprise HDDs, they can also cut power and improve performance without having to replace the entire system, by implementing a simple media change".

Sledgehammer Games' new boots on the ground WWII shooter won't make the jump to Nintendo's new Switch handheld console hybrid, the developers have confirmed.

Although the Nintendo Switch has incredibly strong demand, and Nintendo expects to have a 12.74 million console install base by March 2018, some major AAA publishers aren't ready to bring their biggest properties to the handheld-console combo. Activision's Call of Duty WWII is one such game. The developers at Sledgehammer Games have officially confirmed the shooter won't arrive on the Nintendo Switch, shooting down hopeful speculation.

Last month Sledgehammer Games exec Michael Condry said that it wasn't really the studio's decision, and that "Activision business guys" would be the ones to ask. As it turns out, Activision isn't ready to take that risk just yet, especially due to the Nintendo Switch's constrained supply shortage, which is expected to last throughout 2017.

Toshiba today announced its new high-end BiCS flash memory built on QLC technology (quadruple-level cell), offering a 50% increase in per-package capacity up to 1.5TB.

Toshiba's new third-generation QLC BiCS flash is the world's first 3D NAND memory built on 4-bit-per-cell technology, enabling capacities of 96GB, the largest the memory industry offers to date. Toshiba affirms that QLC BiCS flash can be stacked in 16 dies per package, enabling up to 1.5TB of storage capacity in a single package.

Forward Insights analyst Greg Wong assets that Toshiba's new QLC flash will be tremendously beneficial for datacenters.

Computex 2017 - Toshiba today revealed its new premium high-end XG5 solid state drive that leverages its innovative BiCS 3D flash memory for improved reliability, speeds, and capacities.

Toshiba breaks through new barriers and ushers in a new age of storage proficiency with its new XG5 NVMe SSD, the company's first SSD that uses its third-generation 64-layer BiCS 3D flash memory with 512Gb dies built with the 15nm process. Armed with 64-layer BiCS flash, the Toshiba XG5 NVMe solid state drive can hit blazing fast sequential read write speeds of 3,000 MB/sec (3GB/sec) reads and 2,100 MB/sec (2.1GB/sec) writes.

The XG5 SSD is a single-sided M.2 form factor drive that comes in capacities up to 1TB thanks to its vertically-stacked flash memory, and sports increased reliability with a Mean Time to Failure rating of 1.5 million hours. Toshiba's new high-performance SSDs will be available in the XG5 Series line, which includes drives in three capacities on matching M.2280 form factors: 256GB, 512GB, and 1024GB.

Computex 2017 - Western Digital announces two new high-end solid state drives aimed at enthusiasts and gamers.

Western Digital has revealed the world's first consumer 64-layer 3D NAND SSDs: the WD Blue 3D NAND SATA SSD, which targets DIY enthusiasts, resellers and system builders, and the SanDisk Ultra 3D SSD, which targets high-end gamers. Both premium-grade SSDs rock blazing fast speeds of up to 560 MB/sec reads and 530 MB/sec write speeds, and feature higher efficiency, reliability, and capacities thanks to the company's new 64-layer 3D NAND technology.

The WD Blue 3D NAND SATA SSDs come in 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities and leverage two form factors: 2.5-inch cased drives as well as single-sided M.2 2280. The SanDisk Ultra 3D comes in similar capacities of 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB but are exclusively available in 2.5-inch cased drives.

For the first time ever, Toshiba is publicly demonstrating its new 64-layer BiCS memory at the Dell EMC World conference in Las Vegas.

To demo its third-generation 64-layer BiCS 3D TLC NAND flash technology, Toshiba outfitted a laptop with a prototype XG NVMe SSD with 1TB of BiCS memory to highlight the advantages its new memory brings to the enterprise and consumer storage markets. As Toshiba notes, the new third-gen BiCS flash memory leverages a 64-layer stacking process that offers 65% greater per-millimeter bit density than its 48-layer 256GB storage, offering maximum capacity combined with high-speeds and reliability.

Toshiba also announces that it plans to migrate all client, data center and enterprise SSDs to tap its next-gen 64-layer BiCS 3D NAND TLC memory to ensure optimum performance, capacity, and endurance. No official timeline was given for this migration, but one thing is clear: Toshiba is betting big on its BiCS flash.

We can expect GIGABYTE to unveil a new AORUS-branded M.2 Thermal Guard, a new M.2 heatspreader for your M.2 SSD - and hopefully, on your GIGABYTE/AORUS motherboard.

MSI recently released their own M.2 Shield, a M.2 SSD heatspreader that wasn't as well received as they probably thought - as most people didn't report that it made their M.2 operate any cooler. Hopefully GIGABYTE does things differently with their upcoming AORUS M.2 Thermal Guard, and I'm sure we'll see a new high-end motherboard unveiled at Computex - most likely on Intel's next-gen X299 chipset, something they're expected to unveil on May 30.

Micron's new revolutionary SolidScale tech was unveiled and showcased at the 2017 Micron Summit in New York City's Freedom Tower, and TweakTown's own storage editor Jon Coulter attended the storage giant's big showcase.

Micron has revealed its new SolidScale architecture, a revolutionary platform that unlocks the full potential of NVMe SSDs.

The magic of SolidScale is that it takes the benefits of localized NVMe pools (high-speeds, large capacities) and spreads them out across an entire datacenter system.