Storage News - Page 39

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 and WD believe the impacted quarter will be in the September timeframe with a total hit of approximately $315 - $339 million. As AnandTech reports, the impact on Toshiba is unknown as they are a private company. So, we can only assume a similar financial impact bringing totals speculatively to anywhere between $630 million to $670 million.

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.

Innodisk has just been granted the patent for its fire-proof external SSD by the USPTO, with the new Fire Shield SSD able to survive in direct flames at 800C for over 30 minutes.

The company ran comparison tests before and after the Fire Shield SSD was dunked in flames, with 100% data accuracy results. Inside, what Innodisk has done with the Fire Shield SSD is take inspiration from the black boxes used in planes and other vehicles, which are built to be secure to survive a major crash or explosion.

Innodisk uses triple-layer protection between the outside of the Fire Shield SSD, and the SSD itself. The company is using layers of flame resistant copper alloy, drive-protecting connector design, and heat-isolating lining material. There are over 20 heat-resistant materials used in total.

TEAMGROUP today announced its new T-FORCE CARDEA Liquid Cooled SSDs, with an integrated 'self circulating' liquid cooling block to increase performance. The CARDEA Liquid Series are PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe 1.3 based SSDs with up to 3400 MB/s read speeds.

The new TEAMGROUP T-FORCE CARDEA Liquid SSDs utilize a patented liquid cooling implementation to reduce operating temperatures by up to 10° C.

See below for more spec details on the new T_FORCE CARDIA Liquid series M.2 SSDs from TEAMGROUP.

AMD's new Zen 2 processors have opened up a totally new era for PC hardware, with companies tripping over themselves with new PCIe 4.0 capable SSDs. The latest company to jump into the crazy-amounts-of-bandwidth bandwagon is GALAX with its new HOF Pro SSD.

GALAX's new HOF Pro SSD utilizes the bandwidth of PCIe 4.0 for insane speeds of up to 5GB/sec versus 3.5GB/sec on PCIe 3.0, while write speeds can hit 4.4GB/sec which is up from 2.5GB/sec on PCIe 3.0. Meanwhile, 4K random read IOPS burst to 750K compared to 500K IOPS on PCIe 3.0 while 4K random writes hit 700K IOPS versus 480K IOPS on PCIe 3.0.

This is all thanks to the impressive Phison PS5016-E16 controller.

The day for PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs is here, with our recent look at the Sabrent Rocket PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD offering 1TB for $230 and now the GIGABYTE-made AORUS PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD is being rolled out after its debut during Computex 2019.

I have one of the new AORUS PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs here with me in the 2TB flavor and it is glorious, with GIGABYTE offering up to a huge 5GB/sec in reads and up to 4.4GB/sec writes. The 1TB version will cost $260 while the larger 2TB drive will cost $480. GIGABYTE will be shipping out its new AORUS PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs on July 8, the day after AMD unleashes its new Zen 2 processors and PCIe 4.0-capable X570 chipset on July 7.

You'll want to match the new AORUS PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD with a high-end X570 motherboard and next-gen Ryzen 3000 series CPU, which both drop in a few days time.

We are mere days away from AMD's new X570 platform launching alongside the next-gen Ryzen 3000 series CPUs which are based on the new Zen 2 CPU architecture, so PCIe 4.0-enabled SSDs that pump up to 5GB/sec are now a reality. Sabrent is one of the first to market with its new Rocket NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD.

Sabrent's new Rocket NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD is on Amazon right now and comes in two sizes: 1TB and 2TB which will cost you $230 and $430, respectively. It is powered by the Phison PS5016-E16 SSD controller that has power management support for APST/ASPM/L1, as well as SMART and TRIM commands, advanced wear leveling, bad block management, error correction code, and over-provision.

Sabrent is using Toshiba's BiCS4 96L TLC (triple-level cell) NAND flash memory that provides the Rocket NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD to truly act like a rocket with transfer speeds of up to 5GB/sec reads and 4.4GB/sec writes. Yeah, considering normal 2.5-inch SSDs max out at around 500MB/sec having 10x the speed on tap thanks to PCIe 4.0 is hugely impressive.