For FMS 2017, Seagate made a slew of new announcements including a new 64TB NVMe PCIe SSD, updates to the Nytro SSD lineup, a new RealStor storage appliance, and Nytro Q-Boost technology.

When Seagate announced their 60TB SAS SSD last year, it was an impressive feat however, Seagate and its partners quickly realized that there were limited use cases for the SSD. The capacity was simply too large for the relatively performance limited SAS interface.

For 2017, Seagate went back to the drawing board and announced a new 64TB NVMe SSD which is simply a full height, half-length form factor add-in card containing eight M.2 22110 PCIe Gen 3 x4 SSDs.

Using [...]

Dell announced a massive refresh of its Precision line of workstations at SIGGRAPH 2017, marking the first refresh of the Precision lineup in five years.

Since it’s the 20 year anniversary for Dell’s workstation business, it’s only fitting to talk about Dell’s first workstation and to see how far they’ve come in the 20 years. Dell’s first workstation was the WorkStation 400, which came in a beige box packed with either one or two Intel Penium II processors running at either 266 MHz, 300 MHz or 333 MHz. The system took as much as 512 MB of RAM and ran Windows NT. In 1997, this was absolutely cutting edge [...]

WD recently launched the HGST branded Ultrastar SN200 and SS200 series Enterprise NVMe SSDs.

The Ultrastar SN200 series, which is available in HHHL or SFF 2.5″ form factors will be offered in capacities of 800GB to 7.68TB. What’s most impressive here is performance as the flagship drive features sequential read performance up to 6.1GB/s and random read performance up to 1.2 Million IOPS, a massive 100% increase in sequential reads and 61% increase random reads over their last generation drive.

In addition to the Ultrastar SS200 series, WD is also introducing the HGST branded Ultrastar SS200 SAS Enterprise SSDs. Available in the SFF 2.5″ form [...]

After recently telling investors that they’re planning to make a record $27 Trillion Won ($23.59 Billion USD) investment this year, Samsung recently announced that they’re planning another $1 Billion investment towards their manufacturing facility at Austin, Texas in 1H2017. According to Samsung, the investment will be used to enhance production capabilities of their System LSI plants which produce advanced SoCs (system-on-chip) products for devices such as smartphones, tablets, etc.

Samsung’s Austin Fab, also known as Fab S2 is one of Samsung’s most advanced semiconductor fabrication facilities, producing chips using their 14nm FinFET process [...]

At Flash Memory Summit, Samsung recently unveiled a new 32TB 2.5″ SAS SSD making it the world’s biggest in the 2.5″ form factor. Although Seagate also recently introduced their own massive 60TB SSD at the show, Seagate’s solution utilizes the SFF 3.5″ form factor which is significantly larger than Samsung’s drive.

In order to achieve such capacities, Samsung is leveraging their all new 4th Generation 3D V-NAND which now features 64-layers, a whopping 30% increase in cell density over their previous 3rd Generation 48-layer 3D V-NAND. Samsung’s new 64-layer product utilizes 3-bit per cell (TLC) technology to achieve 512Gb [...]

In addition to the Nytro XP7200, Seagate also unveiled an unnamed 60TB SAS SSD, which Seagate claims is the highest capacity SSD in the world. In order to achieve such a feat, Seagate was able to utilize the same controller used in the Seagate 1200.2 SSD, but also included a staggering 1,280 NAND flash dies linked via bridge chips. These bridge chips allow the SSD controller to communicate with far more NAND dies than would typically be allowed without the bridge chips.

Designed for large storage arrays, archives and other read intensive applications, performance on the drive is weighed towards reads with sequential read performance rated at up to 1,500MB/s and random [...]

FMS was a huge show for Toshiba this year and at their booth, they showed off several new NVMe-based PCIe and SAS SSDs for both their client and enterprise storage lines.

The Toshiba XG3 SSD family is designed for high-performance notebooks and PCs. Utilizing a Toshiba branded controller (likely a jointly developed controller with Phison) along with Toshiba 15nm MLC, the XG3 is capable up to 2,400/1,500 MB/s sequential reads/writes thanks to its PCIe Gen 3 x4 NVMe interface. As usual, Toshiba also brings their proprietary QSBC (Quadruple Swing-By Code) ECC algorithms.

Maximum capacity on the XG3 is 1TB with a dual sided M.2 2280 form factor drive. As a [...]

At FMS 2015, Samsung not only took the crown for introducing the highest-capacity 2.5″ SSD in the industry, but they also took the crown for introducing the highest performance SSD as well. Designed for enterprise customers looking for high performance solutions, the Samsung PM1725 is capable of reaching a staggering 1 million IOPS in a single drive making it the fastest SSD in the world. In order to do this, Samsung is utilizing their new Samsung EPIC SSD controller along with their latest 256Gb 3-bit MLC 3D V-NAND technology.

The Samsung PM1725 will come in two varieties – the HHHL and the 2.5″ SFF form factor. Performance on the different form [...]

At FMS 2015, OCZ showcased both their Z-Drive 6000 Series SSDs. OCZ also revealed their latest Z-Drive 6000 PCIe Gen 3 x4 NVMe Dual-Port SSD for enterprise and data centers.

Manufacturer OCZ OCZ OCZ Model Z-Drive 6000 SFF Z-Drive 6300 SFF Z-Drive 6300 AIC Form-Factor SAS 2.5″ SFF SAS 2.5″ SFF HHHL Controller PMC-Sierra Princeton PMC-Sierra Princeton PMC-Sierra Princeton NAND Toshiba A19nm MLC Toshiba A19nm eMLC Toshiba A19nm eMLC Capacity 800GB/1600GB/3200GB 800GB/1600GB/3200GB 800GB/1600GB/3200GB/ 8TB (Coming Soon) Sequential Read Up to 2900MB/s Up to 2900MB/s Up to 2900MB/s Sequential Write Up to 1900MB/s Up to 1400MB/s Up to 1400MB/s 4K [...]

Following the announcement of the Samsung PM953, Samsung also announced the PM1633a which, thanks to Samsung’s new 256Gb 48-layer 3-bit MLC 3D V-NAND, claims to be the world’s largest drive (flash or mechanical) with a staggering 15.36TB of capacity in a single 2.5″ SAS form factor.

Samsung hasn’t shared too many details on their latest drive just yet, but depending on the overprovisioning on the drive, Samsung is using at least 30 NAND packages with 16 dies per package of their latest 256Gb 48-Layer 3-bit MLC 3D V-NAND to achieve such a feat. That’s at least a staggering 480 dies per SSD if not more! It’ll also likely [...]