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.

ADATA has just released the world's first durable external HDD with RGB lighting with its new HD770G, offering up IP68 waterproof and dustproof goodness, as well as a shock-resistant triple-layer construction.

While it'll look great on the outside keeping all of your games nice and safely stored, on both the PC and consoles I might add. The HD770G can be submerged in 2 meters of water for up to 120 minutes thanks to its IP68 protection. ADATA provides the ultimate in protection with its HD770G external HDD, with patented port covers that provide the crazy protection from water.

ADATA uses a triple-layer construction on the HD770G with a shock-absorbing silicone casing, sturdy buffer, and a cushioned mounting for the hard drive. This means the ADATA HD770G can take a hit or two, or even a decent fall from your desk, or bag. There's even 256-bit AES encryption to boot.

If you've just purchased or are in the market to grab a new X570-based motherboard and new AMD Ryzen 3000 series CPU then you should match it up with a PCIe 4.0-capable SSD for those insane up to 5GB/sec speeds.

ADATA has just added its name into the pile of PCIe 4.0 SSDs with the release of its new XPG GAMMIX S50 PCIe Gen4x4 M.2 2280 solid state drive offers some blistering speeds. We're looking at 5GB/sec reads and up to 4.4GB/sec writes, and is backwards compatible with PCIe 3.0 if you don't have the write board.

ADATA provides its new XPG GAMMIX S50 SSD with an aluminum heat sink, which will reduce temps of the SSD by up to 10C and keep it operating at those up to 5GB/sec speeds. There's also SLC caching, a DRAM cache buffer, and up to 750K IOPs for random read/write operations.