Storage - Page 3

Patriot's Viper Gaming brand has been steadily impressing us in recent years with a string of high-performance SSDs and RAM options that also hit that price-to-performance sweet spot. Its latest release is slightly different; the new Viper Gaming Series V30 A2 is a microSD card designed for portable gaming handhelds like Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch.

microSD storage is the easiest way to expand the storage capabilities of a gaming handheld. All you need to do is put a microSD card into the relevant slot and immediately double or triple the available room to store games, media files, screenshots, and video recordings. The only problem is no two microSD cards are the same, and everything from speed to overall reliability can vary wildly from product to product.

The Viper Gaming Series V30 A2 microSD card sports some impressive specs as a gaming-focused product. It's built with U3, Class 10, A2, V30, and UHS-I technology standards, offering read speeds of up to 100MB/s and write speeds of up to 90MB/s.

KLEVV, the premium brand of Essencore and creator of great-looking and high-performance memory and storage, has announced a pair of new storage options. First is the futuristic and stylish KLEVV GENUINE G560 PCIe Gen5x4 NVMe M.2 SSD, which boasts impressive read and write capabilities of up to 14,000 MB/s and 12,000 MB/s, respectively.

Interestingly, this is the company's first PCIe Gen5 SSD, and it's coming in solid thanks to specs that include 4K random IOPS (up to 1,400K), 5th Generation LDPC technology, and what the company is calling a revolutionary 23x-layer 3D NAND.

Best of all, the stylish design includes passive cooling, with the aluminum fin-style heatsink blending in nicely with the white finish. The new KLEVV GENUINE G560 PCIe Gen5x4 NVMe M.2 SSD is designed for enthusiast and professional gamers, content creators, and general enthusiasts looking for a super-fast SSD and is available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB variants.

Samsung has announced it has started mass production of its new PM9E1: a new Gen5 SSD with the industry's highest performance and largest capacity.

The company is using a Gen5 SSD controller that's made on its in-house 5nm process node, using 8th-generation V-NAND (V8) technology. Samsung says its new PM9E1 will provide "powerful performance and enhanced power efficiency, making it an optimal solution for on-device AI PCs".

Samsung has made improvements to performance, storage capacity, power efficiency, and security over its predecessor in the PM9A1a SSD. YongCheol Bae, Executive Vice President of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics, said: "Our PM9E1 integrated with a 5 nm controller delivers industry-leading power efficiency and utmost performance validated by our key partners. In the rapidly growing on-device AI era, Samsung's PM9E1 will offer a robust foundation for global customers to effectively plan their AI portfolios".

Microsoft has reportedly deployed robots and artificial intelligence to pull apart defective hard disks to gather the valuable materials within them.

Reports from Tom's Hardware and Blocks & Files revealed Microsoft is using a line of robots paired with artificial intelligence capabilities to disassemble old hard drives used in its data centers. Components within these hard drives are also removed by the robots, which feature AI that has been trained to identify the different screw and components locations on various hard disks. Notably, 90% of the components deemed valuable are recycled, which contributes to Microsoft's overall goal of becoming carbon-negative by 2050.

So, what is a valuable component? According to the reports, each year, between 20 and 70 million hard drives die, and just in 2022, Microsoft shredded two million hard drives. Now, Microsoft is committed to "NoShred" and is aiming to hit a 90% recycle rate with its hard drives. The robots dismantling the drives recover valuable components and materials such as magnets, circuit boards, stainless steel chassis, neodymium, and more. Moreover, these robots are designed to ensure data security by identifying and destroying components that carry data.

HighPoint has just announced that its SSD7540 RAID AIC is now qualified to be used with LiquidCool Solutions' immersion-cooling rack servers as well as immersion-cooled server platforms in general.

What does this mean? What's immersion cooling? Why does an SSD RAID AIC need that? Immersion cooling is a style of liquid cooling that submerges either most, or the entire PC in a non-conductive liquid, usually mineral oil. This is for aesthetics and sometimes, cooling efficiency, and sometimes both.

In the data center business, where there will be multiple fully-decked systems stacked on top of one another, immersion cooling becomes a savior in cooling servers. HighPoint's SSD7540 RAID AIC is the first to be submerged into the world of immersion cooling, so it'll be interesting to see a data center do this and show some results of the improvements using immersion-cooled RAID AICs with 8 x SSDs per card (and multiple of these cards installed, by the way).

Iodyne has just introduced its new Pro Mini: a new Smart Drive external SSD with both USB4 and Thunderbolt 4, offering sustained 3GB/sec of read performance when you're on-the-go. Check it out:

The new iodyne Pro Mini features two of Frore's AirJet Mini Slim SSD active cooling devices, which combine the best of performance and reliability, enabling the Pro Mini to blast sustained 3GB/sec performance under intense workloads. If you're a professional with a laptop or PC with USB4 or Thunderbolt 4, you've got 4TB or 8TB capacity to choose from.

Inside, we've got RAID-6 data protection, XTS-AES-256 encryption, fleet management capabilities, Find My tracing (using a Chipolo chip), and device passkeys. The new iodyne Pro Mini consumes around 15W of power under load, and if you remove the 10W of power used by Frore's AirJet Mini Slim SSD cooler, the new drive only uses 5W. 15W for full-blast coolng, and full-blast performance.

SK hynix has just announced it has developed PEB110 E1.S (PEB110), a new high-performance SSD for data centers and the emergence of the AI era.

The AI era, customer demand for high-performance NAND solutions including SSDs for data centers, as well as ultra-fast DRAM chips including High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is growing, says SK hynix. In line with this trend, the company has developed and introduced a new product (PEB110) with improved data processing speed and power efficiency, by using PCIe Gen5 specifications.

SK hynix expects to meet the "diverse customer needs" with a more robust SSD portfolio, following successful mass production of PS1010 with the introduction of the PEB110. SK hynix says it is currently in the qualification process with a global data center customer, with plans of mass production of PEB110 in Q2 2025, pending qualification.

Lexar has just unveiled the world's first stainless steel encased SD cards, joining the growing Armor Series SD cards, with the new SD cards featuring "bend-resistance" and they're IP68 certified.

The company has unveiled its new Armor Series SD cards in the new Armor Gold SD UHS-II, and Armor Silver Pro SD UHS-II cards in up to 1TB capacities. If you've used an SD card enough -- you know, in and out of your cameras constantly, in and out of your SD card reader or into a laptop -- and the casing can break, well... not with a stainless steel SD card from Lexar.

Lexar says it's using 316 stainless steel in the construction of its new Armor Gold SD UHS-II and Armor Silver Pro SD UHS-II cards, with the company adding its new SD cards are bend-resistant and that they're stronger than regular plastic-encased models. Lexas pushes that its new Armor SD cards are "ideal for outdoor filming".

HighPoint has just unleashed its new RocketAIC 7749M2, the world's first 128TB Gen4 x16 AIC drive family, supporting up to 16 x Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 8TB Gen4 SSDs for a total of 128GB Gen4 SSDs at up to 28GB/sec insanity.

You'll be able to buy two different variantsof HighPoint's new RocketAIC 7749M2 AIC card: 64TB and 128TB of Gen4 SSD goodness. The 64TB option includes the RocketAIC 7749MC AIC and 16 x Samsung 990 PRO 4TB SSDs for a total of 64TB Gen4 SSDs for $9900.

The monster 128TB Gen4 SSD configuration includes the HighPoint RocketAIC 7749M2 and 16 x Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 8TB SSDs for a total of 128TB (!!!) of Gen4 SSDs for a much higher $25,999.

One of the great things about the PlayStation 5 is that Sony made expanding the limited internal storage with a high-speed PCIe Gen4 SSD relatively easy. Best of all, the Sony PlayStation 5 supports any compatible off-the-shelf SSD if it meets the minimum speed requirement of 5,500 MB/s.

With the advent of Gen5 SSD storage on PC, the price of Gen4 has come down dramatically, especially when you look at the prices of PCIe Gen4 SSDs when the PlayStation 5 first launched in 2020. Lexar's new PLAY 2280 PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD sports a massive 4TB capacity for $379.99 USD, with 2TB and 8TB options set to arrive in Q4 2024.

The integrated heatsink is designed to keep the SSD running cool while installed in a PS5, but it also features a design inspired by the PlayStation 5 console. Once installed, you won't see it when you're gaming, but it's a nice touch that makes it feel like a perfect fit for the console.