NAB 2018 - The demand for high speed external storage has been growing exponentially and Western Digital is stepping up to the plate with three new professional grade products to enable real-time 4K and 8K workflows.

The new products are part of their G-Technology G-DRIVE and G-SPEED Shuttle product families.

All three products utilize the power of Thunderbolt 3, have transfer rates up to 2800MB/s, and make use of Western Digital's new G-Technology Pro SSDs to offer an ultra-fast, reliable solution. All three products will ship with a 5-year limited warranty.

Today Western Digital announced their latest addition to their SSD line, the Western Digital Black 3D NVMe. Western Digital's new vertically integrated SSD platform has been engineered from the ground up, and specifically architected to help maximize performance for NVMe SSDs.

Advanced power management, durability and endurance for the growing range of applications benefiting from NVMe technology were engineered into the drives by design.

The series of M.2 drives feature a new Western Digital designed SSD NVMe architecture and controller, which optimally integrates with Western Digital 3D NAND. This new breed of SSDs were designed to help remove the traditional storage bottleneck. The drives are set to feature up to a sequential read (up to 3,400 MB/s for 1TB and 500GB model) and write performance (up to 2,800MB/s for 1TB model) combined with up to 1TB.

Nimbus Data has just announced the world's largest SSD that completely trumps the recent 30TB SSD from Samsung, with their new ExaDrive SSD that packs an insane 100TB.

The new ExaDrive 100TB SSD was made for data centers and edge servers for IoT services, with the 100TB of storage holding up to 20 million songs - or as TheNextWeb frames it "about half of Spotify's catalog of streaming music". Insanity.

Nimbus Data made the drive to consume 85% less power per TB of storage, so that enterprise users can use many more of them, use less power, and less physical space in their server racks. A standard rack with these new ExaDrive 100TB SSDs will hold an insane 100PB of storage, that's 1000TB folks.

Western Digital has just announced two new SSDs in the form of the PC SN720 and PC SN520 with both of them NVMe-based SSDs with some impressive speeds.

WD's new SSDs are being aimed at the IoT, edge computing and mobile computing markets. Also think small and thin laptops, 2-in-1s, and embedded PCs for this new range of NVMe SSDs.

Senior Director of Client SSD, Devices Business Unit, Western Digital, Eyal Bek, explains: "With this new vertically integrated SSD platform, we are able to optimize the architecture to our NAND for low latency and power efficiency, and most important, for the growing range of applications benefiting from NVMe, the scalable architecture supports a range of capacity and performance points, while streamlining system qualification to improve time-to-market for our customers".

The SN720 will be available in 256GB, 512GB, 1TB and 2TB while the SN520 will be available in 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB. WD's PC SN720 will arrive on a single-sided M.2 2280 form factor while the SN520 will arrive on single-sided M.2 2280, M.2 2242, or M.2 2230 form factors.

Samsung has just announced its next generation SSD, something it's calling the PM1643, and it has propelled the South Korean giant to new storage records with up to 30TB on tap.

Samsung's new PM1643 boasts a huge 30.72TB of SSD storage, with the company pushing the new SSD for next-generation storage systems for the government, health and education markets, and others. The new 30TB SSD has enough space to hold thousands of movies and countless files.

The new 30TB SSD is twice the capacity of Samsung's current 15.36TB SSD that it unveiled in 2016 which boasted speeds of 2100MB/sec for reads and 1700MB/sec writes. Samsung combined layers of flash memory into "super-sense" 1TB packages in order to double the SSD storage beast to 30TB.

Samsung started manufacturing the new 30TB SSD last month, with plans to unveil a larger family of drives with lower capacities later this year, with no pricing revealed just yet.

SanDisk unveiled its massive but super-small 400GB microSD card last year, but is only now shipping it, at least in the US for now.

The new SanDisk Ultra PLUS 400GB is designed for Android smartphones and tablets, cameras, and other devices that can take the massive 400GB of microSD storage. SanDisk's new 400GB microSD card has the following features:

• Up to 400GB capacity for more full HD video storage
• U1, V10 and Class 10 video rating, full HD video capture and playback;
• Up to 100MB / s transfer speed Support up to 1200 photos in 1 minute;
• A1 application performance level to support faster loading of applications;
• Ideal for Android smartphones and tablets;
• Waterproof, temperature, anti-X-ray, anti-magnetic, shockproof.

As for the price, we should expect it to hit shelves for $250.

Synology have launched the RackStation RS2818RP+, a 16-bay NAS that is able to provide up to 192TB of capacity that can be expanded to 336TB with a RX1217(RP). Basically, the RS2818RP+ is designed for large storage applications for expanding businesses that want to future-proof their technology.

"One of the common challenges for modern small and medium-sized businesses is finding a storage solution that can store large amounts of data while having the flexibility to scale when business grows," said Jason Fan, Product Manager at Synology Inc. "RS2818RP+ offers large storage capacity with affordable TCO. It is ideal to serve as a centralized backup target, a file server or a hub-and-spoke backup target for distributed businesses."

SK Hynix has just taken the wraps off of its new enterprise SSD, packing their in-house 72-layer 64GB 3D NAND flash, and arriving at up to 4TB capacities.

This isn't the first enterprise SSD from SK Hynix using their in-house NAND flash, as the consumer side of the market were first. SK Hynix is releasing the new enterprise SSDs in both 2.5-inch SATA and so-far unspecified NVMe form, but we should expect M.2 as usual.

As for the performance of these new SSDs, we can expect the 1TB SATA SSD to pack sequential reads of up to 560MB/sec while writes will hit 515MB/sec or so, with random reads of up to 98K IOPs, and random writes of up to 32K IOPs.

The PCIe-based version of SK Hynix's new enterprise SSD tops out at 2700MB/sec reads and 1100MB/sec writes, while we have 230K IOPS on random reads, and up to 35K IOPS on random writes.

Samsung have today launched their new 800GB SZ985 Z-SSD, this Z-SSD is designed for advanced enterprise applications that include supercomputing for AI analysis, IoT and other big data applications. Samsung's latest Z-SSD is able to deliver exceptional performance, reliability and ultra-low latency that state-of-the-art AI applications demand.

"With our leading-edge 800GB Z-SSD, we expect to contribute significantly to market introductions of next-generation supercomputing systems in the near future, enabling improved IT investment efficiency and exceptional performance," said Jinman Han, senior vice president, Memory Product Planning & Application Engineering at Samsung Electronics. "We will continue to develop next-generation Z-SSDs with higher density and greater product competitiveness, in order to lead the industry in accelerating growth of the premium SSD* market."

The new single port, four-lane Z-SSD features Z-NAND chips that provide 10 times higher cell read performance than 3-bit V-NAND chips, along with 1.5GB LPDDR4 DRAM and a high-performance controller. This impressive hardware is able to provide random write speeds of up to 170K IOPS, 1.7 times faster random read performance at 750K IOPS and five times less write latency at an incredible 16 microseconds when compared with an NVMe SSD PM963.

Now that performance is covered, how about reliability? The SZ985 Z-SSD has a mean time between failures (MTBF) value of 2 million hours and a guarantee of up to 30 drive writes per day (DWPD) for five years, or a total of 42 petabytes.

Look out for the upcoming ISSCC 2018 (International Solid-State Circuits Conference), which will be held February 11-15 in San Francisco as Samsung plan to introduce both the 240GB and 800GB versions of the SZ985.

Micron announces its latest line of enterprise SSDs that leverage 64-layer 3D NAND technology to boost storage capacities, power efficiency, and more.

Micron's new 5200 series SSDs include the 5200 ECO and 5200 PRO drives, all of which use high-end 3D NAND storage that offers huge capacities up to 7.68TB and can deliver 95k IOPs random reads and 33k random writes. In fact the new 5200 lineup is the first enterprise grade SSD available for purchase with NAND tech, and is optimized for latency-sensitive, read-intensive workloads that demand higher performance.

"Micron 5200 SSDs unleash market-leading performance, capacity and reliability, paired with a rich feature set and unprecedented flexibility, adding up to the ideal storage solution for business-critical workloads," said Micron Storage Business Unit Vice President and General Manager Derek Dicker. "We simplified the server qualification process by leveraging the same foundational architecture that's currently available on Micron SATA SSDs. Customers can trust the same proven controller and firmware design while taking advantage of advanced flash media for better performance, quality of service, and value."

"Today's business-critical, virtualized workloads simply cannot run at peak, consistent performance on yesterday's technology," said Dedicated Computing Senior Vice President Sales and Marketing Dave Guzzi. "Customers need advanced storage technology to achieve better performance and reliability - and a lower total cost of ownership. Fortunately, Micron offers all this along with the ease of a common platform that leverages the same proven controller and firmware design as previous SSD generations."