Seagate is teasing some gigantic HDDs for 2020, with the first half of 2020 seeing the storage giant unleash 18TB HDDs into the world, but by the end of 2020 we'll be seeing even bigger 20TB HDDs.

The company is headed towards releasing the first commercial HAMR-based HDDs in the second half of 2020, while the new 18TB drive will be based on the same 9-platter platform that Seagate uses for its current Exos 16TB HDD. This means that Seagate has everything it needs to put 18TB HDDs into mass production before HAMR arrives in 2H 2020.

Seagate will be putting many more eggs into the HAMR basket going forward, with its own 30TB+ HDD planned for 2023-2024 and an even bigger 50TB+ based on HAMR in 2026. The one thing I think of when I see 50TB is image losing 50TB of data in a single drive... that is millions of photos, videos, and untold billions of files gone in an instant. Still, from a tech perspective -- 50TB in a single drive, WOW.

Microsoft has teased a new glass-based storage medium in 'Project Silica' that sees the company storing data onto glass plates that will last for 100s of years. The glass has been baked in ovens, dropped into boiling water, heated up in a microwave and even scratched with steel wool -- but like Superman, it's damn near invincible.

The first thing to be stored on the glass-based storage is Superman: The Movie from 1978, with glass square that contains Richard Donner's timeless classic measuring in at 7.5cm x 7.5cm x 2mm and holds 75.6GB of data.

Glass-based storage might seem weird but it makes sense, as archived master copies of films are normally only touched when they're moved out of storage to be remastered. Film isn't the most stable or secure storage method and it's far from a long-term solution, so older movies sitting in Hollywood studios being moved onto glass-based storage like Project Silica makes sense.

Portable SSDs have been a thing for a while now with newer NVMe drives taking flight with the introduction of Thunderbolt 3. However, Crucial is putting the power of USB 3.2 Gen 2 to work on the new X8.

As shown, the drive is a smaller unit, likely housing an M.2 2280 drive internally. The exciting part is that this unit uses USB protocol, which opens up the compatibility to several devices and even game consoles. The stated speed is up to 1050 MB/s sequential and requires a USB 3.2 Gen 2 port. A standard USB 3.2 Gen 1 (USB 3.0) port will allow for half that speed or a 5Gb/s interface.

The Crucial X8 is tested with drops of up to 7.5' which means it should be able to handle being tossed in book bags or laptop bags without much worry. It comes with a Type-C cable and a Type-A cable to maximize compatibility for the X8 and ensure it should fit most anything you would want to use it on.

Remember back when everyone was using floppy drives to store data? Well, while everyone else has moved onto USB's and other forms of storage such as SSD's and HDD's, the United States nuclear weapons deterrent has JUST upgraded from floppies recently.

While it might be hard to believe that the United States military were still using ancient technology such as floppy drives, it was a reality. This was mostly due the security of data on the older drives, as explained by Lieutenant Colonel Jason Rossi, 595th Strategic Communications Squadron commander, "You can't hack something that doesn't have an IP address. It's the age that provides that security."

But now the time has come to upgrade, as the Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS) are moving forward as apart of a $400 billion, 10-year program to modernize the United States' nuclear military technology. Recently nuclear weaponry is talked about quite a lot as most people are concerned with the sheer power the weapons can produce. If you are concerned about nuclear weaponry, here is an example of what can happen if a nuke was to hit a major city.

The launch of AMD's Ryzen 3000 and the new X570 chipset has come with new memory speed capabilities for Ryzen. Also, supported is PCIe Gen 4, which is all but useless for GPUs, but one area definitely makes good use of it, storage! Storage supporting PCIe Gen 4 launched with GIGABYTE and Corsair leading the charge, but we knew it would not be long until others entered the ring. Enter TEAMGROUP and their well-established prowess in both memory and storage.

T-Force Dark Z DDR4

TEAMGROUP today announced its first entrants into official Ryzen 3000 and X570 targeted memory and SSD products. The memory labeled T-Force Dark Z is offered in several capacities and frequencies. The baseline for the Dark Z is 3200MHz, with kits reaching up to 3600MHz and 4000MHz. Most enthusiasts know that the proposed sweet spot for Ryzen 3000 is 3600 for a smooth plugin and go performance option as the FCLK and UCLK can all be synchronized across the platform for optimal performance.

Many users have found that DDR4 3800 can be done while still syncing the clocks, but that's a bit more involved. By the time you reach 4000MHz, you are going to be tweaking your FCLK and other things to get optimal performance and offset the latency hit; you will take when changing from 1:1 to 2:1.

Kingston is a well-known name in the memory game, but some may not be aware that they also hold a powerful position in the SSD storage space as well.

Kingston has been in the flash storage game since the onset of the consumer SSD. Many may think of Samsung when thinking storage, without realizing that an industry stalwart such as Kingston while being the less celebrated holds a lot of the cards in the market.

According to a recent report from TrendFocus, Kingston has already surpassed the 13.3 million unit sales in the first half of 2019. 13.3 million in an economy of scale may not seem like much, but in reality, that is 11.3% of the total SSD purchases globally. Kingston's market presence goes into every facet of the PC flash storage realm from base consumer 2.5" drives which they currently are reported to hold over 27.3% of the market share. To the enterprise/data center market which Kingston is already within and picking up steam.

**DISCLAIMER: this is a prototype and does not reflect an actual product. This is a technology demonstration and eventual product specs will differ.**

That's right friends, we have a pair of TweakTown boots on the ground in Seoul Korea. Today at Intel Memory and Storage Day, Intel showed something that can only be described as HOLY S*&% fast.

Intel had a demo rig, with a prototype version of new OPTANE DC Persistent Memory modules. This was not just for show as the modules had plenty of GO! Now we have to temper our expectations for this as this is purely a tech capabilities demo which is why we added the above disclaimer. With that out of the way, I will mirror the words of our soldier on-site Mr. Jon Coulter who passed this info along and observed the demo first hand.

ADATA have released their new SC680 external SSD which weighs just 35g and is 10mm thick, has a USB-C connector and some high-speed transfers to get your data to and from the external SSD.

The new SC680 external SSD has up to 530MB/sec read speeds and up to 460MB/sec write speeds which ADATA points out is over 6.6 times faster than an external HDD. ADATA using a USB-C connector makes using the SC680 external SSD a breeze, because you can't pout the cable in the wrong way like you can with traditional external HDDs.

Even better, the new ADATA SC680 external HDD works with Windows, Mac OS, and Android -- meaning you can plug it into virtually any device you own.

GIGABYTE has officially launched its new AORUS Gen4 AIC, a new quad-SSD PCIe 4.0 adapter that can take up to 4 x NVMe SSDs and offer up to a huge 15GB/sec of throughput.

The new AORUS Gen4 AIC SSD 8TB uses a full PCIe 4.0 x16 slot and has 4 x 2TB M.2-2280 SSDs that are powered by the Phison PS5016-E16 controller. GIGABYTE is using a heat sink and active fan to keep the AORUS Gen4 AIC operating cool, too.

As you can see, it feature a huge 5.5mm pure copper heat sink, two ball bearing blower fan, a baseplate, and even 8 thermal sensors that keep everything monitored. AORUS Storage Manager software will let you keep tabs on your AORUS Gen4 AIC and you'll be able to tweak the cooling to your liking with 3 modes: Silent, Balance, or Performance.

Samsung has just unveiled its new PCIe 4.0-based SSDs with some truly insane brute speed, where they are close to invicible and will never die.

First off, the new Samsung SSDs won't be finding their way into your gaming PC at home and rather enterprise/server markets. The new PM1733 and PM1735 (at least for now) are going to be a family of new SSDs with 19 new models on the way.

Samsung will offer them in various form factors and capacities, with PCIe add-in cards and 2.5-inch U.2 drives with capacities between 800GB and 30.72TB. The new SSDs tap PCIe 4.0 for some crazy speeds, offering sequential writes of up to 3.8GB/sec -- but the reads can top 6.4GB/sec and for its add-in card model it'll reach the dizzying heights of 8GB/sec.