DRAM and NAND prices have soared over the past year due to shortages and it looks like VRAM prices are following a similar trajectory as well. According to a recent article by Digitimes, VRAM price quotes have soared by 30.8% in August, leaping from $6.50 per package in July to $8.50 per package.

The price increase is due to RAM leading RAM manufacturers shifting production focus to memory for servers and smartphones. Samsung, which accounts for 55% of the worldwide VRAM supply, has more than doubled its server DRAM production from 12% to 27%. SK Hynix and Micron which account for the rest of the world’s VRAM production has significantly increased production [...]

Last year I was fortunate enough to be among the first to review the Samsung T3 Portable SSD. The drive was small, durable, fast, available in capacities up to 2TB, and relatively good looking making it not only my favorite portable SSD, but also my most highly recommended as well.

Of course, with Samsung’s annual release cycles, Samsung recently launched the new Samsung T5 Portable SSD which we’ll be reviewing today.

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 [...]

After the successful release of the Force MP500 PCIe SSD earlier this year, Corsair is adding another PCIe SSD to the mix with the new Corsair Neutron NX500.

The new SSD will be available in capacities of 400GB, 800GB, and 1600GB will come in an HHHL form factor and feature support for NVMe over a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. Performance of the Neutron NX500 is rated at up to 3,000/2,400 MB/s sequential reads/writes and 300K/270K IOPS 4K random reads/writes. The NX500 will also feature MLC NAND for greater performance and reliability compared to TLC NAND.

The Corsair NX500 400GB and 800GB capacity drives are now available with the 1,600GB capacity drive available [...]

For FMS 2017, Samsung shared several new releases along with its SSD/NAND flash roadmap for the coming years. Among the new releases include Samsung’s 96-Layer QLC (Quad Level Cell) NAND and a few new enterprise SSDs.

64-Layer 3D V-NAND Transition

Samsung is already transitioning its entire line of products to utilize 4th Generation 64-layer 3D V-NAND. Their 64-Layer 3D V-NAND has been in mass production since June of this year and promises to be 30% faster, 30% more power efficient, and 20% more reliable than previous generation 48-layer 3D V-NAND.

This could potentially mean that Samsung’s successor to the 960 Pro and 960 [...]

Kingston and Marvell are celebrating a great two years as a recent press release revealed that Kingston has shipped over 6 million Marvell powered SSDs.

Kingston and Marvell’s relationship didn’t begin until February of 2015 when Kingston shipped the first HyperX Predator PCIe SSDs featuring Marvell’s 88SS9293 controllers. Since then, Kingston has utilized Marvell’s 88SS1074 controller in the UV400 series SSD and will soon launch the UV500 series SSD carrying Marvell’s 88SS1074 paired with 3D NAND.

Kingston will show off their latest Marvell powered SSDs at FMS 2017.

To meet the capacity and performance demands of the rapidly developing IoT industry, Toshiba is introducing the BG3 SDD, a tiny, single-package SSD for thinner, more reliable mobile and embedded devices.

As the successor to the BG2, the BG3 uses Toshiba’s 64-layer TLC NAND for higher storage density per drive. It also features a DRAM-less design for better power consumption, lower cost, and a smaller footprint.

Utilizing two PCIe 3.0 lanes and Toshiba’s in-house controller, the BG3 can achieve sequential read/write speeds of up to 1,520MB/840MB/s respectively. The BG3 also has an SLC caching feature which can boost performance when the drive [...]

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 [...]

At a special event at SIGGRAPH 2017, Dell revealed the Precision 5520 mobile workstation, commemorating 20 years of Dell Precision workstations.

Crafted in a beautiful brushed aluminum finish, the Dell Precision 5520 mobile workstation is according to Dell the thinnest and lightest 15-inch mobile workstation on the market. The laptop features a thickness of just 0.66-inches at its thickest point and a weight of just under 4lbs for the fully loaded unit.

What do you get in such a compact package? Well, you get a choice between the Intel Core i7-7820HQ or the Intel Xeon E3-1505M v6, up to 32GB of DDR4, Nvidia Quadro M1200 graphics and up to 1TB M.2 [...]

Dell showed off an entire array of new lineup of Skylake-W and Skylake-SP servers at SIGGRAPH 2017 which we’ll be covering soon, but before that, we wanted to share a few of the docking solutions and adapters for PCIe NVMe SSDs that caught our eye.

The first is a hot swappable M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD dock which is the first time we’ve seen such a solution. Designed for Dell Precision workstation users who want to be able to take full advantage of NVMe PCIe SSD storage, but also want to be able to take it on the go, Dell’s M.2 hot swap dock includes a compact hot swap tray for M.2 SSDs which allow the hot swap [...]