Storage News - Page 3

Sabrent has been enjoying FMS 2024 so far, teasing its array of Rocket SSDs -- in both Gen4 and Gen5 -- and its upcoming Thunderbolt 5-based Rocket XTRM5 external SSD.

The company showed off all of its leading SSDs at FMS 2024 this week, including the Rocket 4 in both 1TB and 2TB capacities (and the larger Rocket 4 4TB teased, which is coming soon) and the Gen5-ready Rocket 5 in 1TB, 2TB, and the larger 4TB capacity. Sabrent also had its Rocket Nano 2242 in 1TB, and the Rocket Q4 (it's so cute) in 2TB on the show floor at FMS 2024.

Our SSD review Jon Coulter said in his review of Sabrent's new Rocket 5 4TB SSD: "Sabrent is back to doing Sabrent things. We love it and can't help but admire their strategic move to wait for a final form E26 14,000 MB/s SSD before jumping into the PCIe Gen5 fray and then being the first among storage retailers with it. Additionally, making their first Rocket 5 offering to be fully reviewed its highest capacity, most over the top 4TB model, is exactly what Sabrent has done historically".

KIOXIA is attending the Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) conference in Santa Clara, California. The creator of flash memory and the innovative BiCS FLASH 3D technology is showcasing a new prototype broadband SSD with an optical interface designed for the next generation of data centers.

Replacing electrical wiring with an optical interface allows KIOXIA to create a greater distance between the compute and storage devices, paving the way for more flexible designs without sacrificing efficiency or signal quality.

In fact, an optical interface makes it possible to aggregate components like an SSD and CPU that can "efficiently utilize resources according to a specific workload" by placing them in different rooms or locations separated by up to 40 meters of optical fiber (up to 100 meters in the future). In a data center, optical SSD storage could be located in one room with fewer cooling requirements, lowering the energy footprint.

Memblaze has announced it has hit a significant milestone at FMS 2024: the shipment of over 150,000 units of its PBlaze7 7940 series PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs since they launched at FMS 2023 last year.

The enterprise-focused Memblaze PBlaze7 7940 SSD features the Marvell Bravera SC5 controller and the latest NAND flash technology. Leveraging deep optimization by the engineering team at Memblaze and its Unified Framework Platform, the PBlaze7 7940 SSD delivers 2.5x the performance and 1.5x the power efficiency of conventional Gen4 SSDs.

FMS 2024 is this week, with Memblaze expanding the capacity of its PBlaze7 7940 to a huge 30.72TB of Gen5 SSD goodness for enterprise customers. This expansion significantly reduces SSD and server deployments, lowers TCO, and decreases carbon emissions.

Silicon Motion has just unveiled its new SM2508 Gen5 SSD controller, the best performance-per-watt Gen5 SSD controller at FMS 2024.

The new Silicon Motion SM2508 Gen5 SSD controller is the world's first PCIe Gen5 client SSD controller using TSMC's 6nm EUV process node, which provides a 50% reduction in power consumption compared to other SSD controllers using the 12nm process node.

The company says that the entire SSD uses less than 7W of power, the new SM2508 Gen5 SSD controller has 1.7x better power efficiency than Gen4 SSDs and up to 70% better than competitive Gen5 SSDs already on the market.

Micron has just announced it's the first in the industry to develop a PCIe Gen6 data center SSD for ecosystem development.

Ahead of FMS 2024 this week, the US-based memory giant continues on its announcements recently of the world's fastest data center SSD -- the new Micron 9550 -- which further bolsters Micron's leadership position in AI storage.

Micron's new PCIe Gen6 SSD delivers a sequential read bandwidth of over 26GB/sec, which is a large leap over the 14GB/sec (or so) that we're getting from new Gen5 SSDs on the market now. Micron is making its new PCIe Gen6 SSD available to partners, kickstarting the PCIe Gen6 ecosystem.

Sabrent has just teased its new Rocket XTRM 5, which uses Intel's new Thunderbolt 5 connectivity to create one of the fastest standards on the planet with up to 80Gbps of bandwidth.

The new Sabrent Rocket XTRM 5 delivers the dream of pumping desktop-class ultra-fast transfer speeds to an external SSD thanks to Sabrent's world-class SSDs, mixed with the new insane bandwidth capable through Thunderbolt 5.

Sabrent will make its upcoming Thunderbolt 5-powered Rocket XTRM 5 SSD in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, so there's one for everyone. It would've been nice to see 8TB at launch, but I'm sure we'll see that down the track.

Samsung has launched new 1TB capacity variants of its Samsung PRO Plus and Samsung EVO Plus microSD cards, bringing capacity and speed to various compatible devices. Having 1TB to play with on a tiny microSD is impressive, with sequential read speeds of 180MB/s on the PRO Plus and 160MB/s on the EVO Plus - fast enough for 4K video and gaming.

As you can slot a microSD card into a range of portable gaming devices, including the Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck, ROG Ally, and countless other Windows and Android gaming handhelds from companies like MSI, Lenovo, and AYANEO, 1TB goes a long way.

As Samsung highlights in its announcement, it's enough to store 45 console games (weighing 20GB each) or over 400,000 4K images.

Regarding the AI boom, we often think about GPUs, data center CPUs, and products from companies like NVIDIA. Well, specifically NVIDIA, whose H100 and upcoming Blackwell B200 GPUs and Superchips are at the heart of the generative AI movement. To the point where AI-related GPU revenues have made NVIDIA one of the biggest companies in the world.

But there's more to AI than Tensor Cores and high-end silicon processors from Team Green; high-speed memory and storage are also essential components for assembling massive data centers and supercomputers that train complex models like Meta's recent Llama 3.1.

So, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the DRAM and NAND Flash industry is expected to see "significant increases" in revenue this year. According to market analysis and reporting, DRAM and NAND Flash revenue for 2024, which includes memory and storage, will see increases of 75% and 77%, respectively.

SK hynix has announced its SSD export volume from its M15 production line located in Cheongju, Chungbuk, where SK hynix makes its NAND flash and SSDs, has increased 84% in 1H 2024 compared to 1H 2023.

The South Korean semiconductor manufacturing giant exported around $501 million in SSDs in the first half of 2024, compared to $272 million in the first half of 2023, driven largely by AI demand and data centers' need for more and faster SSDs.

Kim Woo-hyun, SK Hynix's Chief Financial Officer (CFO) said: "We are currently expanding sales of high-capacity enterprise SSDs in response to increasing demand, and to this end, we are increasing the utilization rate of some NAND plants".

Sabrent has up some amazing deals on Amazon right now, with up to 26% discount on select products, check them out:

First up we've got the Sabrent Universal Docking Station with Stand for Tablets and Notebooks, which is discounted 20% from its original price of $99.99 down to $79.95. There's also the Sabrent USB-C Universal Laptop Docking Station, with tons of USB-C connectivity, dual HDMI 2.0 and dual DisplayPort 1.4 display connectors, discounted 21% down from $99.95 to $79.95.

Sabrent also has the USB-C to 2.5GbE ethernet adapter, which is made for the Apple MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and iPad Pro 2018 and later. From its name, you should work out it's a USB-C to 2.5GbE ethernet adapter, converting USB-C to wired 2.5GbE (super-fast) ethernet. This is discounted 26% from $26.99 to $19.99 right now.