Storage News - Page 42

Flash Memory Summit 2018 - In 2015, Micron purchased a start-up SSD controller company called Tidal Systems, Inc. Tidal was on the verge of announcing IP and products when Micron purchased the company and all of its assets. Since then, Tidal Systems disappeared, and so did the products it was working on. At FMS 2018, Micron displayed a next-generation SSD with a Micron-branded controller. A company representative went off the record to confirm this is the long awaited Tidal NVMe controller.

Everything we could gather on the client SSD can be seen in the video. The display show two unannounced products, the first with a Marvell SATA controller paired with QLC flash. The middle product, the one with the Micron branded controller, is more interesting.

The display leads us to believe Micron will release the unnamed NVMe SSD to OEMs for high-performance systems. It supports user mode encryption and appears to be an 8-channel architecture with support for DDR4. The screen makes it difficult to see more than the broad strokes.

Flash Memory Summit 2018 - After ravaging the consumer SSD market for the last two years, Silicon Motion took the wraps off its first enterprise-focused controller.

The SM2270 will initially ship in enterprise SSDs from subsidiary Shannon Systems. SMI will likely have a number of additional design wins. Most of the companies we speak with on the consumer SSD side praise SMI for exceptional customer service and responsive field engineers that help bring products to market.

The SM2270 supports up to PCIe 3.0 x8 and started out as a design for add-in cards (AIC). Changes in market conditions pushed SMI to move the design to 2.5" products with dual-mode compatibility. We may see the SM2270 used in both AIC and 2.5" products.

Samsung announced mass production of the company's first 4-bit per cell V-NAND SSD for the consumer market. The drive will use Samsung's 1Tbit V-NAND and ship in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities.

The company didn't release the series name for the new QLC-enabled drive but we doubt this will fall under the 860 EVO series. Performance is said to be similar to 3-bit per cell V-NAND products thanks to TurboWrite technology that writes most data in a consumer workload to a SLC buffer.

"Samsung's new 4-bit SATA SSD will herald a massive move to terabyte-SSDs for consumers," said Jaesoo Han, executive vice president of memory sales & marketing at Samsung Electronics. "As we expand our lineup across consumer segments and to the enterprise, 4-bit terabyte-SSD products will rapidly spread throughout the entire market."

Toshiba announces the world's first 96-layer TLC SSD, the XG6, is shipping to system builders. This line replaces the XG5 and becomes the drive of choice for builders looking to advance system performance by leveraging Toshiba's new BiCS4 TLC memory technology.

The new XG6 features performance up to 3,180 MB/s / 2,960 MB/s sequential read / write and up to 355,000 / 365,000 IOPS random read and write speeds. The series currently ships in three sizes from 256GB to 1TB (1024GB), all in a single-sided M.2 2280 form factor.

Just days ago Toshiba and manufacturing partner Western Digital announced BiCS4 QLC with 1.33Tbit capacity die. The XG6 utilizes new 96-layer 512Gbit TLC die from the same BiCS4 family. The flash features a 40% footprint reduction on the wafer. Toshiba is using string stacking technology to build the first 48 layers and then dropping a second 48-layers on top. Samsung is the only company to announce a true 90+ layer product without using string stacking technology.

Western Digital has begun sampling the world's first 1.33 Terabit (Tb) four-bit per cell, 96-layer 3D NAND (BiCS4). The die breaks new ground for flash capacity and runs over the 800MT/s Toggle 3.0 interface standard, twice as fast as the company's previous generation 4-bit per cell technology.

Western Digital plans volume production this year with manufacturing partner Toshiba in the Yokkaichi, Japan facility. BiCS4 products will appear later this year under the SanDisk brand. Western Digital expects to utilize BiCS4 in a variety of applications, from SD cards to enterprise SSDs over the lifetime of the product.

"Leveraging Western Digital's silicon processing, device engineering and system integration capabilities, the QLC technology allows 16 distinct levels to be sensed and utilized for storing data," said Dr. Siva Sivaram, executive vice president, Silicon Technology and Manufacturing at Western Digital. "BiCS4 QLC is our second generation four-bits-per-cell device, and it builds on the learnings from our QLC implementation in 64-layer BiCS3. With the best intrinsic cost structure of any NAND product, BiCS4 underscores our strengths in developing flash innovations that allow our customers' data to thrive across retail, mobile, embedded, client and enterprise environments. We expect the four-bits-per-cell technology will find mainstream use in all these applications."

Following our weekend review of the Inland Professional SATA III $75 480GB SSD, the drive moves into second place on Amazons Best-Selling Internal SSD List.

The drive didn't break any performance records in our tests but proved to be a good entry-level SSD. It's not a replacement for most existing SSDs but it a low-cost alternative to hard disk drives.

If you are not familiar with the brand, Inland Professional is a house brand for Microcenter. The company has a number of brick and mortar stores in the United States but is known primarily for discounted CPU and motherboard packages. The SATA III started shipping around March this year but only gained popularity recently when prices fell for all SSDs. The drive ships with a standard 3-year limited warranty honored through Microcenter.

Update: 7/10/18, 16:00 EST

HP returned our message with new information not yet available on Amazon. The warranty remains at 5-years but the endurance extended even more than we first reported.

EX920 1TB - 650 TBW

Samsung began mass production of 5th generation V-NAND flash memory with 96-layers.

Samsung must not like paying second place to Micron's new 64-layer flash memory found in products like the MX500 and SX8200. The company just announced mass production of 5th generation V-NAND memory with a new high-speed memory interface, lower power, and another massive reduction in write latency.

This is Samsung's first 96-layer memory but the current production version will not increase SSD sizes. Samsung chose to build 256Gbit die (32GB) first, the same size used on most Samsung consumer SSDs today. The press release went on to mention a future 1Tbit (128GB) size to follow soon in both TLC and QLC flavors.

Seagate released its first consumer SSD since 2013 today with a blog post and exclusive Amazon campaign. The new drive carries familiar BarraCuda branding and comes in 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB sizes initially. The blog post from Seagate's Marketing and Public Relations Manager, John Paulsen, indicates a 2TB option is on the horizon.

As a global leader in storage solutions for nearly four decades, Seagate understands that read and write speeds play a huge role in the overall performance of your computer. That's why BarraCuda SSD provides maximum sequential read and write speeds, reaching 540/520 MB/s.

It starts up in seconds, allowing you to almost instantly access data, load game levels, open applications, and transfer files. You and your computer will be good to go - fast. It's our fastest option for upgrading a PC or a laptop to optimize performance.

ADATA has just revealed its latest SR2000CP, a new enterprise SSD that has storage speeds that will blow your mind, and it's all coming out of a PCIe 3.0 x8 slot.

The new ADATA SR2000CP is available in 2TB, 3.5TB, 4TB, 8TB, and even 11TB capacities that all feature 3D "eTLC" NAND flash that has 3 bits per cell, with endurance cycles that are similar to MLC NAND flash. But it's the read and write speeds of the new ADATA SR2000CP that'll blow your mind.

ADATA has tested the 4TB version of the new SR2000CP which had sequential read speeds of up to 6GB/sec and writes of 3.8GB/sec. The company is also providing enterprise-friendly features like user-configurable over-provisioning, power loss protection that keeps your data safe, native 256-bit AES encryption, and 55C ambient temperature operation that is perfect for the specs Google define for their datacenters.