Storage News - Page 56

Let's face it: current-gen console gaming isn't hard drive friendly. Since a single 50GB game takes up 10% of an Xbox One's stock 500GB hard drive, gamers often have to delete and swap out titles in their library to keep up. But ADATA aims to avoid the frustration with its new line of spacious Xbox hard drives.

ADATA's new HD650X and HD710M external hard drives are specifically designed to give Xbox consoles a much-needed boost in storage capacity. Both models sport USB 3.0 connectivity for speedy transfers and come in 2TB flavors for optimum storage, offering up to four times the capacity of stock HDD's. The drives support easy plug and play setup, and are compatible with Xbox Ones, Xbox 360s and Windows 10 PCs.

The HD650X external HDD sports a lively lime-green style that matches the Xbox theme, and ships with a 3 year warranty despite it being quite durable against HDD-destroying elements like water, dust and electric shock.

Toshiba and OCZ are following up the Trion 100 budget SSD series with the Trion 150, a $150 solution with added performance over its predecessor.

The 150 is built on Toshiba's 15nm Triple-Level Cell (TLC) NAND flash technology. Specs-wise, it features sequential read speeds of up to 550MB/s, sequential write speeds of up to 530MB/s, random write I/O performance of up to 91,000 IOPS, and as much as 240TB total bytes written.

Four capacities with four different price points will be offered: 120GB ($50), 240GB ($70), 480GB ($140), and 960GB ($270).

A company called Fixstars, from Japan, has released one of the largest SSD's to date. It has 13TB of space in it's 100x70x15mm case. Just imagine being able to have your entire Steam library plus every document you ever created, easily and quickly accessible?

For comparison, it can hold up to 823 hours of H.256 compressed 4K video. What a dream that would be. But this gigantic SSD is about $18,000 total, if we go by the current price of NAND per gig. To actually find out the price, you'd have to ask for a quote as it's actually intended for the enterprise or data-center markets. The current largest amount of NAND you can buy is from 4.6TB from SanDisk or Intel. So this is a major leap forward.

Looking at the specs it looks like it uses Toshiba's 15nm MLC NAND and a SATA 3.0 interface for speeds of up to 580MB/s read and 520MB/s write. That's not too shabby. The endurance should also be a bit more than the average considering the market it's in and the potential for higher over-provisioning due to the massive amounts of space available. There's no word on what controller it uses, but for enterprise it'll have to be a reliable one with good garbage collection and I/O performance. Anyone want to go halfsies on this one?

Storage titan Seagate has just revealed its first helium-filled hard drive aimed at the cloud datacenter market.

Seagate's new helium-filled hard drive is set in a 3.5" form factor and features 10 terabytes of storage capacity. The drives specifically target cloud datacenters that need extensive storage space as well as memory efficiency, both of which helium-filled drives can accommodate. Traditional hard drives are filled with air, but filling the drives with helium allows manufacturers to fit more platters to increase capacity, improve power usage, and maximize accuracy of the actuator arm.

The new hermetically-sealed enterprise-class hard drives feature seven platters at 1.43 TB a piece, along with 14 heads. Speeds have yet to be determined, and are assumed to be 7200RPM. Seagate affirms that the helium-filled drives utilize the company's PowerChoice technology to help manage power consumption during idle times. Thanks to the benefits of helium gas, the new 10TB drives have a Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) rate of 2.5 million hours, which is significantly better than existing enterprise drives.

Seagate is on quite the roll lately with the introduction of an 8TB NAS focused consumer HDD, which is a first in the industry. This HDD uses six platters with 1.33TB per platter, making it incredibly dense. It'll be shipping this later on in this quarter for $385.

Though it's being marketed towards everyone, it's really designed for the NAS and RAID applications, which likely entail a much more constant workload. Each of the six 1.33TB large platters use perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology that's been well refined since commercial introduction in 2005.

The drive operates at 7200RPM with 256MB of DRAM cache and a SATA 3 interface. The dense platters and even the normal spindle speed should allow a peak transfer rate from the media to the internal cache of about 216MB/s, which is quite impressive for a mechanical device. This new NAS HDD joins Seagate's other SMB and consumer NAS drives that can be found in 4-6TB's of storage space.

CES 2016 - M.2 NVMe SSD's are all the rage. There are several products slated to hit the market this year and one of the drives we are most excited about is OCZ's upcoming RevoDrive 400. Rumored to be powered by a proprietary controller and 15nm MLC flash, the RevoDrive packs a punch that is sure to delight enthusiast's everywhere.

Early-adopting enthusiasts that feel held back by commodity SATA storage can't wait to get their hands-on the impending RevoDrive 400 series which was designed and engineered for ultimate next generation storage performance. The NVMe™ PCI Express Gen. 3 x4 SSD series redefines the boundaries of speed and the limitations of storage capacity with up to 2.4GB/s of bandwidth and up to 1TB on a single M.2 module.

OCZ was kind enough to give TweakTown a first look at a RevoDrive 400 512GB SSD in action. These benchmarks display an impressive 2.6GB/s sequential read performance and an equally impressive 1.6GB/s sequential write performance. Looks like the 950 Pro may have some serious competition coming soon from Team OCZ.

If having a good camera capable of 4K video weren't enough, you have to have the proper storage to actually record that. So if you plan on using a Sony A7R II or perhaps even the newly announced Nikon D500 or D5, then you might want to invest in some good storage media for that.

Sony's newest XDQ alone can reach read speeds of 440MB/s and writes speeds of up to 150mb/s, which is more than enough for moving large 4K files on-the-fly. It's massively fast compared to older generations of the portable media. You'll be able to find it in 32, 64 and 128GB capacities .

They're also introduction a new SF-M series of SD cards that can read at a rate of 260MB/s and write at a very swift 100MB/s. Just keep in mind that those speeds are ideal and are likely limited in older cameras with slower connective interfaces. But that's plenty fast, again, for writing high bit-rate 4K video, which is slowly becoming standard in DSLR's. The only competitor that needs to release a consumer 4K ready DSLR (or mirrorless) is Canon, and it's only a matter of time.

CES 2016 - TweakTown visited Patriots suite at CES 2016 and got a first look at Patriot's upcoming Hellfire PCIe-based SSD. This soon to be released SSD has generated a lot of buzz in the enthusiast community. TweakTown's storage editor, Jon Coulter, was given the opportunity to run a couple of benchmarks with a 480GB Hellfire PCIe SSD.

Featuring capacities of 240GB, 480GB and 960GB, these new products promise read speeds of up to 3000MB/s and write speeds measuring in at a maximum of 2200MB/s. With the Hellfire utilizing PCIe 3.0 x4 technology, check out our benchmark results in the full news story. Enjoy!

Patriot states the Hellfire should hit retail channels in Q1 2016.

CES 2016 - Phison was showcasing their extensive line of storage products at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, with PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe solutions, as well as next-gen SSDs using 1Znm TLC flash. Not only that, but flash drives using USB Type-C and super-fast 128GB SD cards were also on the table.

Starting with the PS5007-E7 which is the latest PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe-based SSD controller which Phison says "is in the final phase of performance tuning", with it hitting 2.6GB/sec reads and 1.5GB/sec writes - they are not for the faint-hearted, that's for sure. The PS5007-E7 features random performance of 300K IOPS read, and 250K IOPS write. Random performance sits at 36K IOPS. We should expect it to hit the consumer space in March, with drives arriving at up to 4TB.

Moving onto the PS3110-S10, which is a SATA 6Gbps controller, but it now supports the latest 1Znm NAND flash technology. Together with the 1Znm TLC, the S10 controller "saturates" the SATA bus, but adds "additional proprietary technology to provide a robust solution".

Apple Mac upgrades certainly aren't cheap, but users should know that they're purchasing a system without many upgrade possibilities being given.

Other World Computing (OWC) are a zero emission Mac and PC technology company and are one of the global experts when it comes to pimping out your Mac system. Its latest offering is the 4.0TB Aura SSD upgrade for the 2013 Apple Mac Pro, set to cost a cool $2,128 for anyone who wants the privilege.

If you're not prepared to spend that kind of cash, $895 will get you the 1.0TB version or you can spend $1,447.99 on the 2.0TB kit instead. Packed within these kids are the SSDs themselves, an Envoy Pro SSD USB 3.0/3.1 enclosure for the existing 2013 Mac Pro SSD (so you can transfer files or use it in the future), a complete installation kit for the Aura SSD and a three year OWC warranty.