Storage News - Page 53

Apple has all but confirmed its new iPhone for next week, with the September 7 press event locked in, and Apple ready to announce the new iPhone, and surely a slew of other products and announcements.

One of them is here early, with Apple has announced a change to its iCloud pricing, with a new 2TB option. With rumors that Apple will unveil a larger 256GB model iPhone 7, the supersized iCloud tier will surely be welcomed next week, and for Apple-heavy users.

The new iCloud pricing is as follows, with all prices in USD:

Flash Memory Summit 2016 - Phison has debuted its new consumer, embedded and enterprise flash controller and NAND solutions at the Flash Memory Summit 2016. This includes the new PS5008-E8/E8T PCIe Gen 3x2 NVMe controller, 3D NAND solutions for both PCIe and SATA, design-in solutions, and plenty more.

The consumer-focused Phison PS5008-E8/E8T is the company's first PCIe Gen 3x2 NVMe controller, which offers 3x the speed that SATA offers, but at the same cost. The Phison E8 is capable of 1.6GB/sec reads and 1.3GB/sec writes, while it offers sequential read/write speeds of 240K and 220K IOPS, respectively. What makes this SSD especially appealing is that it delivers 3x the performance of SATA SSDs for the same cost.

Phison's new E8 controller features SmartECCTM, End to End Data Path Protection and Host Memory Buffer support which when packaged together, offers great data security and reliability. Phison's new E8 is in its engineering stage right now, with Phison saying it will be available by the end of 2016.

Flash Memory Summit 2016 - Our storage guru on the ground at FMS 2016, Jon Coulter, has snapped a photo of the world's fastest SSD - from a company you might not have even heard of; Fadu.

Fadu's new drive is capable of a huge 5GB/sec in both sequential read and write, with 1100K random read IOPS and 500K random write IOPS. Fadu's upcoming EC800F is from their FREE series of SSDs, with FREE being an acronym for Fast, Random Access, Energy efficiency and Economics.

The new Fadu EX800F is their fastest NVMe-based SSD, which is made possible over the PCIe 3.0 x8 connection. We should expect more information on Fadu's products later in the year, but we will definitely be keeping a close on them, that's for sure.

Crucial debuted its MX300 SSD range last month with the 750GB model, but now the company has just announced three new models in its MX300 line up.

We now have the 275GB, 525GB and 1TB models - with the 275GB MX300 SSD costing just $69.99, while the 525GB model costs $129.99. The 750GB model costs $189.99, while the 1TB jumps up to $259.99. The 525GB, 750GB and 1TB drives all have read/write speeds of 530MB/sec and 510MB/sec, respectively, while random performance is 92K IOPS for reads, while there's 83K IOPS for writes.

The smaller 275GB model is slightly slower, with 500MB/sec write speeds and reduced random read speeds of 55K IOPS. All four of the drives arrive in the 2.5-inch form factor, while M.2-based variants will be here next month. All of the drives include a 3-year warranty, with rated endurance of 220TB.

Samsung has just launched its juggernaut 4TB 850 EVO solid state drive, the world's largest consumer-grade SSD on the market.

Built with Samsung's renowned V-NAND technology, the 4TB 850 EVO SSD melds the reliability and endurance of the 850 EVO series with high-end performance. Set in a slim and compact 2.5-inch form factor, the Samsung 850 EVO 4TB model sports all the trimmings and optimizations of the 850 EVO line with blistering-fast 540 MB/s read and 520 MB/s write speeds with TurboWrite.

Four terabytes is quite a staggering amount of data, especially for an SSD; for reference the 4TB 850 EVO can hold up to 1,000 two-hour 1080p movies with compression--that's more than two or three movie libraries on a single 2-inch SSD. The colossal SSD also features a 1.5 million hour MTBF rate, and uses the SATA 6Gb/s interface for speedy transfers.

Samsung has continued its portable storage dominance, announcing the world's first removable UFS memory card.

The company has the new removable UFS memory cards in 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and 256GB with some pretty crazy speeds to boot. Samsung's new UFS cards have read speeds of up to 530MB/sec, which is 5x faster than even the fastest microSD cards. This means you can download a 5GB file from the UFS card in around 10 seconds, compared to UHS-1 microSD cards where it would take around 50 seconds.

Samsung has also boosted the write speeds on its new UFS cards, with up to 170MB/sec on tap, nearly double that of the fastest microSD cards like SanDisk's Extreme Pro, which writes at up to 100MB/sec. Samsung has crammed this type of speeds into the new UFS cards because of the high-resolution footage being captured by smartphones to action cameras, aerial drones and 360-degree cameras.

Computex 2016 - QNAP always impress when it comes to NAS systems, with their product line being on show at Computex 2016 once again. The company was showing off their new NAS systems powered by Intel's new 6th generation Core i3/i5/i7 processors, as well as the next-gen TVS-x82T Thunderbolt 2-powered NAS.

The new TVS-x82T line of NAS systems include SATA M.2 SSD and 2.5-inch SSD cache abilities, something that will super-charge your video editing speeds with up to 20Gbps of bandwidth available - enough to handle multiple 4K video transfers, and displays. Nerd alert! The new TVS-x82T lineup comes in 4-, 6-, and even 8-bay solutions depending on your needs.

Then we have the new quad-core TS-831X which offers a "powerful yet affordable NAS solution with two built-in 10GbE SFP+ ports to accelerate applications that require a fast, high-bandwidth and reliable NAS, including intensive data transmission, video storage, streaming and editing". QNAP adds that studios can use the 10GbE storage solution "at a budget price, create a centralized file center for storage, backup and sharing with the rich native apps, and rely on the NAS scalability to accommodate increasing amounts of media files".

Computex 2016 - QNAP were not only pushing their usual NAS systems at Computex this year, but their new QIoT Containers - but what in the world are QIoT Containers? They're QNAP's new private IoT cloud platform, which is an "extension to QNAP's robust Container Station that supports LXC and Docker® containerized apps suited for microservices-based architectural patterns as applied to IoT systems".

With QNAP launching its QIoT Containers, the company is also "launching multiple containers (including Ponte, Node-RED, Kafka, Dashing, Freeboard, Redis, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, and MariaDB) that can be used to define private IoT stacks on QNAP NAS. QIoT Containers reduces the expenses of relying on public IoT cloud platforms and provides the easiest, most convenient, and highly-configurable IoT stack for developers to accelerate development with low time to market".

QNAP boss Teddy Kuo explains: "QIoT Containers keeps sensitive data under your control and complements public IoT cloud platforms. We envision that QIoT Containers will help organizations boost microservices and modernize legacy applications to drive more business opportunities".

Computex 2016 - Thecus were on top of their game at Computex this year, showing off the latest advances in their network attached storage (NAS) products. Thecus had their entire line of NAS products on show at the Foxconn IPC group booth, too.

The company had their upgraded window NAS series, as well as teasing their next-gen enterprise, 16-bay NAS that is powered by a Skylake-based Intel processor and DDR4 RAM. The company also took the time to make a big deal of their upcoming N4810, a new 4-bay multimedia NAS that is capable of 4K playback. The Thecus N4810 is powered by a quad-core Intel Celeron N3160 processor that clocks at up to 2.24GHz under burst, with 4GB of RAM and dual Ethernet ports.

For more information on Thecus' NAS products, check out their website, here.

Computex 2016 - SanDisk unveiled their new SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive USB Type-C flash drive during Computex 2016, with the new generation drive featuring a new retractable design, higher speeds, more capacity, and more.

Vice President of SanDisk's Product Marketing, Dinesh Bahal explains: "With its reversible connector, impressive speeds, and multi-purpose potential, USB Type-C is a game-changer. More Type-C devices are entering the market and through our Type-C mobile drives, we can offer consumers a complete line of mobile storage solutions. The new SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive USB Type-C flash drive now provides more than twice the capacity and offers the flexibility to quickly and conveniently move photos, videos and files between devices, as well as the freedom to expand device capacity".

The new SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive USB Type-C flash drive comes in up to 128GB with a reversible USB Type-C connector and a standard USB Type-A connector that will allow you to connect it up to your PC, notebook, or even smartphone and tablet. We have USB 3.1 performance pushing up to 150MB/sec, which is more than enough speed to throw huge files onto the drive, at high speeds. The new drive arrives in capacities of 16GB, 32GB, 64GB and 128GB with pricing of $19.99, $29.99, $39.99 and $69.99, respectively.