Toshiba has just unveiled the world's first PCIe 4.0-based enterprise SSDS at Flash Memory Summit 2019, with the new Toshiba CD6 and CM6 series SSDs use PCIe 4.0 lanes to drive speeds through the roof.

Mixed with Toshiba Memory's in-house and latest 96-later BiCS4 FLASH NAND we have up to 6.7GB/sec transfer rates. Yeah, 6700MB/sec.

Toshiba's previous-gen CD5 and CM6 were based on PCIe 3.0 x4 lanes with max speeds of around 3.2GB/sec, so the lanes opening up on the PCIe 4.0 highway drive speeds at up to 6.7GB/sec is a huge win. Even more so when you consider it's a huge 12x speed improvement over the normal SATA drives at 525MB/sec (0.5GB/sec compared to 6.7GB/sec is huge).

Western Digital has just launched five new external storage devices that are being aimed at gamers, with both PC and Xbox One options on offer as well as a super-fast external SSD that I need in my life.

The new WD Black range of gaming drivers comes with up to 12TB of storage, which is enough to keep every single one of the games in the Xbox Games Pass safe and sound. Western Digital made these new drivers with gamers in mind, taking into consideration that most gamers have around 20 games installed that use around 1.7TB of space.

• WD Black P10 Game Drive. It has up to 5TB (125 games) for $150. 2TB for $90 and 4TB for $130. The largest has a capacity for 125 games on a 2.5-inch drive. The 2TB drive has 140 megabytes (MB) per second transfer time, and while 4TB and 5TB versions have 130 MB/second. It has Superspeed USB of 5GB/second connectivity, with one drive and multiple platters. It ships in August.
• WD Black D10 Game Drive. It has 8TB, or up to 200 games on one drive. It has a 250MB/second transfer speed with 7200 RPM drives. This drive has active cooling technology and two 7.5-watt charging ports on its power supply so you can charge gaming accessories. It costs $200, stands vertically or horizontal. It has its own fan and ships in September.
• WD Black P50 Game Drive SSD. It has 500GB, 1TB, or 2TB. It uses the Superspeed USB at 20 gigabits per second with Type-C connector. It ships in the fourth quarter, has USB-powered LED lights. It transfers data at 1,980MB/second and it has forged aluminum for its top for passive cooling. Pricing is TBD.
• WD Black P10 Game Drive for Xbox One. It costs $110 for 3TB or $150 for 5TB. You also get two months of free subscription to Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass Ultimate - a $30 value. It has 130MB/second transfer rates and USB 3.2 Gen1 connectivity.
• WD Black D10 Game Drive for Xbox One. It has8TB for 200 games or 12TB for up to 300 games, 250MB/second transfer speed, 7200 RPM, two 7.5-watt charging ports, and external power. It can stand vertically or horizontal and comes with a three-month subscription for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. It ships in September for $300.

SK Hynix has returned to the retail SSD market with its surprise unveiling of the new SuperCore SSD series, which will be a retail-focused line of SSDs with capacities of 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB.

The new SK Hynix SuperCore SSDs will begin with the Gold S31 in the 2.5-inch form factor, will use a "SK Hynix Controller" and use SK Hynix 3D NAND flash. We're to expect sequential read speeds of up to 525MB/sec while sequential writes are at 560GB/sec.

There's nothing too special with the new SSDs as the read/writes are on par with most other high-quality 2.5-inch SATA SSD, but SK Hynix is backing them up with a large 5-year warranty. The 1TB model has much higher endurance with up to 600TBW compared to 200/300TBW (TBs written) on the smaller 250/500GB drives.

• SK Hynix Gold S31 - 250GB - $49.99
• SK Hynix Gold S31 - 500GB - $77.99
• SK Hynix Gold S31 - 1TB - $123.99

Samsung's new PM1733 is a thing of beauty, and will be the first to use the company's in-house PCIe 4.0 SSD controller and fifth-generation 512Gb TLC V-NAND chips.

The upcoming Samsung PM1733 rocks up to huge 8GB/sec in random read speeds, and up to 1,500,000 IOPS. It will come in two form factors with the first being the U.2 drive that will use four PCIe 4.0 lanes and come with up to 30.72TB of storage. Samsung's other PM1733 SSD will come in a HHHL model (half height, half length) that will use eight PCIe 4.0 lanes, and up to 15.36TB of storage.

Samsung's new PM1733 SSD will work in existing PCIe 3.0 slots but you'll be restricted by the maximum PCIe 3.0 bandwidth and not receive all what the new PCIe 4.0-capable SSDs push out with up to 8GB/sec on the new PM1733.

FMS 2019 - Silicon Motion went on a rampage at Flash Memory Summit this year, detailing its SM2270, SM2271, and SM8108 SSD controllers -- amongst others, including NVMe 1.4 and PCIe 4.0 designs.

We'll start with the SM2270 which is a high-performance PCIe NVMe SSD controller for the datacenter, packing a 16-channel enterprise NVMe controller with a PCIe 3.0 x8 interface, dual 32-bit DRAM data bus, and triple ARM Cortex R5 dual-core CPUs.

We have 4KB random reads of up to 800K IOPS, while 4KB random writes are up to 200K IOPs. SMI is tapping the latest 3D NAND and QLC NAND flash for the SM2270 which will arrive in capacities of up to 16TB.

Phison has been kicking storage ass this year with its break-out PS5016-E16 SSD controller -- which has been capable of up to 5GB/sec and can arrive with up to 2TB of NAND flash.

Well, at the Flash Memory Summit this week Phison decided to tease its new PS5018-E18 mainstream controller that will have a bunch of tweaks under the hood. Comparing it to the E16 SSD controller, the new E18 SSD controller will really ramp things up with up to 7GB/sec transfer speeds.

The current, and still very much kick ass PS5016-E16 SSD can push up to 5GB/sec -- but was made on the 28nm node and NVMe 1.3 standard. Phison's new PS5018-E18 SSD controller is made on the new 12nm FFC node, bumps up its CPU cores to 3 x Cortex-R5 (compared to 2 x Cortex-R5s on the E16 SSD controller) and arrives on the newer NVMe 1.4 standard.

FMS 2019 - Silicon Motion has shown off its new SM2264 SSD controller at the Flash Memory Summit 2019 this week, with it being a new PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe 1.3 SSD controller that will power the new waves of super-fast NVMe SSDs arriving.

The new SM2264 controller has an 8-channel flash interface with up to 16TB, while sequential read speeds reach up to 6.5GB/sec and writes get up to 3.9GB/sec. The random read and write IOPS on the Silicon Motion SM2264 are at 700K IOPS, with the new SM2264 powered by the latest 9x-layer 3D TLC/QLD NAND flash.

Silicon Motion also had the new SM2267 controller, which is also a new PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe 1.3 SSD controller, but has a 4-channel flash interface and up to 8TB. The sequential read speeds on the SM2267 are up to 4GB/sec while the writes are at up to 3GB/sec. For random read and write IOPS we have 400K IOPS while it also use 9-layer 3D TLC/QLC NAND.

Back on June 15th, Western Digital and Toshiba had a 13-minute power outage at their Yokkaichi operations campus in Japan which impacted the NAND production for both partners in a severe way.

Now we have news that nearly all production capacity is back up to normal operations. This was divulged as part of WD's Q4 2019 investor relations posting/notice. Back when the power outage happened, it was estimated that the total NAND capacity impacted was 6 EB or Exabytes of total NAND flash wafers. Just for reference, 6 exabytes is equivalent to 6 million Terabytes. That may seem like a lot, and that is because it is.

Toshiba is busy at Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, but the big news is coming across as Toshiba has now launched their XL-Flash.

XL-Flash is an SLC part designed for very low latency. It is meant to combat Samsung's Z-NAND or even Intel 3D Xpoint which powers their OPTANE storage solutions.

XL-Flash is stated as you can see above to have a 5-microsecond delay which is 10x faster than existing TLC (50-microseconds). XL-Flash will be available to partners, which is a nice shift since Samsung's Z-NAND is locked to their models. We should see some very capable and speedy drives coming very soon.

Liqid will have its latest and greatest SSD shown off in all its glory at the Flash Memory Summit this week, with one of the world's first PCIe 4.0 x16 (yes, x16 and not x4 like the rest) SSDs. Meet the new Liqid Element LQD4500 SSD.

Liqid's new Element LQD4500 SSD rocks 4 of Phison's PS5016-E16 controllers, all wired up with a custom firmware and up to 32TB of raw 3D TLC NAND flash. There's up to 24GB/sec of sequential read and write speeds on the drive, which is pretty damn mind blowing, and up to 4 million read and write IOPS while sustained random writes are at 600K.

The card will be offered as a full-height full-length (FHFL) card with a rather large one-wide passive cooler which also looks nice and slick. It means that it can be installed into systems that need super storage speeds, and only use a single slot with up to 24GB/sec speeds.