TEAMGROUP unveils the T-FORCE CARDEA Z44Q PCIe 4.0 SSD with two patented cooling modules, QLC Flash, and PCIe Gen 4x4 interface that supports the latest NVMe 1.4 standard and provides a massive capacity of up to 4 TB. Consumers can opt for different specs based on their preference and needs, and gamers can have everything from cooling, performance, and capacity in one SSD, and explore the infinite possibilities with T-FORCE CARDEA Z44Q PCIe4.0 SSD.

Equipped with QLC Flash, the T-FORCE CARDEA Z44Q PCIe 4.0 SSD supports the latest PCIe Gen 4x4 interface and NVMe 1.4 standards, meaning that it is compatible with PCIe Gen3.0 interface while offering up to 4 TB in capacity. The read/write speeds reach up to 5,000/4,000 MB/s, which are 10 times faster than traditional SSDs, making it a pioneer for the new TB M.2 era and the best choice for players in terms of cooling, speed, and capacity.

Crucial, Micron's global consumer brand of memory and storage, today launched an expansion of its award-winning portable solid-state drive (SSD) portfolio to offer consumers more options for external storage performance, capacity and value at any price point. The new products include the high-capacity 4 TB portable SSD at a RRP of 489.95 USD, and a new 500 GB portable SSD for a wallet-friendly RRP of 69.95 USD. Consumers looking to store large gaming libraries or more movies for long road trips will find an ideal solution in the Crucial X6.

With read speeds up to 800 MB/s, the 4 TB drive performs up to 5.6 times faster than portable hard drives in the market and are drop-proof up to 6.5 feet. Similar to the existing products in the Crucial X6 portable SSD lineup, the 4 TB and 500 GB versions deliver compact portable SSDs in these capacities to consumers for the first time. The entire award-winning Crucial portable SSD product line is compatible with the latest USB-C-enabled devices, such as PCs, Macs, PlayStation 5, Android devices and more. When used with the Crucial USB-C to USB-A adapter, the portable drives also work with PS4, Xbox One, XBOX Series S|X and other USB-A devices.

GIGABYTE Technology, (TWSE: 2376), an industry leader in high-performance servers and workstations, today announced the G262-ZR0 for HPC, AI, and data analytics. Designed to support the highest-level of performance in GPU computing, the G262-ZR0 incorporates fast PCIe 4.0 throughput in addition to NVIDIA HGX technologies and NVIDIA NVLink to provide industry leading bandwidth performance.

Samsung today has officially taken the lid off their latest consumer-oriented SATA SSDs, the 870 EVO. The 870 EVO series from Samsung don't push the maximum storage density ceiling on traditional SATA consumer drives, topping out at a maximum 4 TB, but they do achieve that ceiling whilst making use of Samsung's 128-layer TLC (Triple-Layer-Cell) NAND, which offers increased endurance (and higher theoretical performance than) more widespread QLC-based SSDs (of which Samsung launched the 870 QVO back in July 2020).

Samsung quotes SATA sequential read and write speeds of 560 MB/s and 530 MB/s respectively, with a "variable SLC" cache (which means it decreases in maximum size as the available free drive space decreases). The drives are also quoted at 98K IOPS Random Read, and 88K IOPS Write, and feature the company's Intelligent TurboWrite to maintain the interface's SATA 6 Gbps saturation as long as possible before sustained performance degradation appears. Samsung claims the 870 EVO also delivers a nearly 38% improvement in random read speeds over the previous 860 model, and quotes a (TBW) rating of 2,400 TB (or a 5-year limited warranty, whichever comes first) for its 4 TB model. The 870 EVO is available in either 256 GB, 512 GB, 1 TB, 2 TB, or 4 TB capacities, with the drives' RAM buffer scaling almost accordingly (512 MB DDR3 for the 256/512 Gb models, 1 GB for the 1 TB, 2 GB for the 2 TB drive, and 4 GB for the 4 TB one. Pricing starts at $49,99 for the 256 GB model; 500 GB for $79.99, 1 TB for $139.99; 2 TB for $269.99; and 4 TB for $529.99.

Alienware, the gaming division of Dell Technologies, has today announced a lineup refresh, meaning that all of the existing products will get upgraded to versions with the latest hardware. And to start off, the company has equipped their thin and powerful Alienware m15 R4 and m17 R4 laptops with the latest hardware we saw announced just yesterday. The laptops are equipped with 12-phase voltage regulation modules to power the newest NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3000 series of mobile GPUs. To pair with a strong GPU, Alienware decided to use 10th generation Intel Comet Lake-H designs. These new laptops can be equipped with up to 4 TB of PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD storage and up to 32 GB of 2933 MHz RAM. For display, options range from FHD LCD to a 4K OLED panel and 360 Hz refresh rate for the m17 R4 model.

Western Digital Corp. today announced it's now delivering 4 TB portable SSDs across its consumer brand portfolio. Giving consumers and professionals more space to create, the new drives are built to keep up with today's high-quality content demands. The four drives now offer gamers, content creators, enthusiasts and creative professionals the performance, durability and greater capacity they need to capture, move and save their files.

"This milestone allows us to deliver a new era of solutions with the capacity and performance our customers have been asking for. Our consumer brand products are used by millions of professionals and consumers around the world, and we continue to drive technology forward to deliver the performance, reliability and leading products they demand," said Jim Welsh, senior vice president and general manager of Consumer Solutions Products, Western Digital.

Greenliant has secured major design wins with its EnduroSLC solid state drives (SSDs) in a wide range of demanding, extreme environment applications for customers that need best-in-class reliability and product longevity. Greenliant's proprietary EnduroSLC Technology substantially enhances data retention and extends the write endurance of 1-bit-per-cell SSDs with advanced hardware ECC capabilities and NAND flash management algorithms. EnduroSLC SSDs not only offer superior data retention capabilities under complex temperature conditions, but also support 50K, 100K and industry-leading, ultra high 250K+ program-erase (P/E) cycles, which are at least a 5x improvement over pseudo-SLC (pSLC) SSDs and a 50x improvement over MLC NAND-based products.

For systems that are in remote locations and costly to maintain-from satellite to subsea communications-customers recognize the value of EnduroSLC SSDs; they can reliably operate and retain data for long periods of time in harsh conditions. Long-life, write-intensive products, such as transportation black box recorders and industrial data loggers, have also benefitted from the enhanced features of EnduroSLC SSDs. EnduroSLC storage products are designed with Greenliant's advanced SATA, NVMe PCIe and eMMC controllers, operate at industrial temperatures (-40 to +85 degrees Celsius) and are backed by the company's Long-Term Availability program (http://bit.ly/SSD-LTA-program), providing an extra level of support.

Sabrent, an American hardware manufacturer, has recently started breaking records with the world's first everything. Starting from the recent 8 TB PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD that comes in M.2 format, Sabrent doesn't plan to stop there. Thanks to the keen eyes of folks over at TweakTown, we have found out that Sabrent has prepared to launch the new Rocket Q4 SSD which is a PCIe 4.0 NVMe monster. Coming in the capacity of 4 TB, the company has built the world's first 4 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD.

When it comes to specifications of the SSD, it can reach some quite impressive speeds. When writing, it reaches 3500 MB/sec (3.5 GB/sec), and in the reading, it can reach up to 4900 MB/sec (4.9 GB/sec). Now imagine putting two of these in RAID 0. Nonetheless, we don't know what controller the company is using for this model. The NAND chips used are QLC based. But you are now wondering about the price of it. The purchase of this SSD will set you back $770 with a heatsink or $750 without one. You can purchase the SSD here.

Ampere Computing, a startup focusing on making HPC and processors from cloud applications based on Arm Instruction Set Architecture, today announced the release of a first 80 core "cloud-native" processor based on the Arm ISA. The new Ampere Altra CPU is the company's first 80 core CPU meant for hyper scalers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Being built on TSMC's 7 nm semiconductor manufacturing process, the Altra is a CPU that is utilizing a monolithic die to achieve maximum performance. Using Arm's v8.2+ instruction set, the CPU is using the Neoverse N1 platform as its core, to be ready for any data center workload needed. It also borrows a few security features from v8.3 and v8.5, namely the hardware mitigations of speculative attacks.

When it comes to the core itself, the CPU is running at 3.0 GHz frequency and has some very interesting specifications. The design of the core is such that it is 4-wide superscalar Out of Order Execution (OoOE), which Ampere refers to as "aggressive" meaning that there is a lot of data throughput going on. The cache levels are structured in a way that there is 64 KB of L1D and L1I cache per core, along with 1 MB of L2 cache per core as well. For system-level cache, there is 32 MB of L3 available to the SoC. All of the caches have Error-correcting code (ECC) built-in, giving the CPU a much-needed feature. There are two 128-bit wide Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) units, which are there to do parallel processing if needed. There is no mention if they implement Arm's Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) or not.

ORIGIN PC is celebrating its 10th anniversary of building world class high-performance custom PCs for gamers, enthusiasts, and professionals with a one-of-a-kind gaming system showcasing the best of PC gaming and console gaming. The system is called Big O, which combines a high-powered gaming PC with an Xbox One X, PlayStation 4 Pro, and Nintendo Switch inside a modified ORIGIN PC GENESIS chassis. This build is a throwback to the original award-winning Big O system built in the early years of ORIGIN PC's history that at the time combined a powerful gaming PC with an Xbox 360.

By using their case modding and PC building expertise, the ORIGIN PC team spent countless hours testing, designing, and building the modern Big O as a stunning technical showpiece. With inspiration from previous custom builds, the Big O offers an incredible hardline liquid cooling solution for the Intel Core i9-9900K CPU and NVIDIA TITAN RTX GPU, which also extends to the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro. As for the Nintendo Switch, the team built a custom dock in the front panel of the Big O using the original hardware in order to retain the complete "docking" capabilities of the system. Thus the Nintendo Switch can be docked for full screen gameplay or removed to take gaming on the go.

As of March 31, 2019, Backblaze had 106,238 spinning hard drives in our cloud storage ecosystem spread across three data centers. Of that number, there were 1,913 boot drives and 104,325 data drives. This review looks at the Q1 2019 and lifetime hard drive failure rates of the data drive models currently in operation in our data centers and provides a handful of insights and observations along the way.

Hard Drive Failure Stats for Q1 2019
At the end of Q1 2019, Backblaze was using 104,325 hard drives to store data. For our evaluation we remove from consideration those drives that were used for testing purposes and those drive models for which we did not have at least 45 drives (see why below). This leaves us with 104,130 hard drives. The table below covers what happened in Q1 2019.

Western Digital is launching a behemoth, consumer-oriented 4 TB SSD based on its WD Blue product line. The WD Blue 4 TB uses the SATA interface (for which controllers are still slightly cheaper than for NVMe solutions) with a Marvell 88SS1074 4-channel controller with a 64-layer 3D TLC NAND from SanDisk. Read and write speeds are basically SATA III-bound (sequential 560MB/s read and 530MB/s write speeds, with random 4K read/write of 95K/82K IOPS.)

The WD Blue 4TB SATA SSD has its official availability date on May 13th, but it's already popping up here and there around retailers' shops in Europe. The 4 TB SSD is being priced at €545, which seems to be inline with expectations for such a capacity level. Quick napkin math saying that these should find a home at the sub-$500 level is very likely accurate, considering past pricing practices from manufacturers between the European and US markets.

Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc. today announces a new addition to its popular family of CANVIO external hard drives (HDDs), a 4 TB option in its ADVANCE, BASICS and READY series. The 4 TB option gives up to 33 percent extra storage (compared to 3 TB) for consumers and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that want to store large files and back up their data. Using 1TB platter technology allows the 4 TB CANVIO models to maintain the same low-profile design as 3 TB models. All models support Windows and Mac operating systems and are compatible with both USB 3.0 and USB 2.0.

CANVIO HDDs combine a sleek, slim and stylish design with practical features such as a ramp-load design to prevent internal wear, plug-and-play functionality, backup and security software (available on the ADVANCE models), and a range of more flexible capacity options of 1 TB, 2 TB, and now 4 TB.

Samsung has unwittingly released some specs and product images of the as of yet unannounced SSD product. The 860 Pro SSD carries the model number MZ-76P4T0E, and has a pretty impressive 4 TB capacity that's sure to deliver the highest performance possible on the SATA III interface. The stated performance levels stand at 560 MB/s read speeds, and 530 MB/s write, which should be more than enough for most usage tasks. Pricing is also more than enough, and then some; Samsung is quoting a $1,899 pricing for this particular drive.

Toshiba has announced immediate availability of their new 8 TB solution for you storage-mongers out there. The TX 300 brings an 8 TB, 7200 RPM HDD to an interesting $260 price-point. Yes, we know everyone would love to have that amount of storage even in a good, old SATA III SSD for about the same price - but now is not the time to daydream. For the foreseeable future, the best option for cheap storage in such quantities lies with our old and (somewhat) trusty platter-based storage tech.

Storage options are available at 4 TB, 5 TB, 6 TB and 8 TB with 128 MB cache. These drives feature perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), which allows for higher areal density than traditional (now seldom used) longitudinal recording. Additional security and reliability features have been baked in on these particular models - the motors are attached to both the top and bottom of the unit and there is an increased attention to shock and vibration dampening. These drives are available now, and the 8 TB option will set you back the aforementioned $260. I'll save you from whipping up the old calculator, because at this storage capacity and pricing, price per GB stands at a mere $0.0318.

Samsung introduced a massive 4 terabyte variant of its popular SSD 850 EVO. The drive takes advantage of the company's latest 48-layer 3D V-NAND flash memory, and uses eight 2 Tb stacks driven by the company's existing S4LP052X01-8030 triple-core controller. The drive offers sequential transfer speeds of up to 540 MB/s reads, with up to 520 MB/s writes; up to 98,000 IOPS sequential reads, with up to 90,000 IOPS sequential writes. It's currently only offered in the 2.5-inch form-factor, with SATA 6 Gb/s interface. Backed by a 5-year warranty, the Samsung 850 EVO 4 TB is priced at US $1,499.

Samsung HDD, a division of Seagate Technology, today announced 4TB M3 Portable and the P3 Portable external hard drives, which are the first 4TB USB-powered single drive solutions to come in 2.5" cases in the world.

"Previously only attainable in desktop or bulky multi-drive internal designs, we can now achieve a 4TB capacity in a compact drive thanks to the latest Samsung HDD technology," said Dave Klenske, director of product line management, Samsung HDD. "By going to a single drive solution, we can power the drive through just a USB connection while fitting it into a case that is only a 1/10 of an inch thicker than our 2TB drive. They are the perfect lightweight drives for notebook computer owners who need to access media collections too large to fit on traditional internal storage options."

WD, a Western Digital company and storage industry leader, today introduced WD Purple NV, a purpose-built line of 3.5-inch, high-capacity 4 TB and 6 TB hard drives for the greater demands of scalable network video recorder (NVR) surveillance systems.

Compared with standard WD Purple drives, the new member of the WD's surveillance video recording family of drives, WD Purple NV, is designed for larger-scale network surveillance systems utilizing higher hard drive bay counts and greater numbers of attached cameras, which demand increased storage capacity and durability. The new drives' high capacities also enable long video retention periods for analysis and reference. WD Purple NV is also designed to withstand the demands of always-on digital NVR recording environments. It offers low power consumption and many advanced performance features typically reserved for higher end surveillance storage.

Eurocom is launching the thin and light, M5 Pro with a choice NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M and 970M graphics, 32 GB DDR3-1600 memory, 4 TB storage, a stunning 4k (3840x2160) 15.6" display and an Intel Core i7 4710HQ processor. If there was ever a laptop that could blur the lines between ultraportable and gaming it would be the EUROCOM M5 Pro, powerful enough to run current and future games at ultra with the weight, dimensions and battery life of an ultraportable.

The EUROCOM M5 Pro is Eurocom's newest innovative creation. A lightweight 2.6kg laptop with superb performance. It is powered by the next generation of world's most powerful NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M and 970M graphics and features a beautiful 4K, 3840-by-2160 pixels display. The EUROCOM M5 Pro is extremely thin and mobile while still offering a stunning 4TB of storage with four physical drives with a combination of traditional SSD/HDD as well as new, innovative M.2 slots. Sleek, slim, super high performance, the M5 is another "little monster" from Eurocom that will blow everybody away, while gaming or doing your corporate bidding.

SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash storage solutions, today announced the Optimus MAX Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid state drive (SSD), the industry's first 4 TB SAS SSD. The Optimus MAX SSD achieves a capacity point that far outpaces today's highest-capacity 2.5" 10K and 15K rpm SAS hard-disk drives (HDDs), making it the first true replacement for legacy mission-critical data center SAS HDDs. Most notably, the Optimus MAX SSD delivers SAS performance and functionality at a breakthrough price point that was previously only available in SATA-based SSDs.

The Optimus MAX SSD tops the newly refreshed Optimus SAS SSD family and also joins the company's newly announced Lightning Gen. II 12 Gb/s SAS SSDs, extending SanDisk's entire SAS portfolio to cover the performance, capacity and endurance needs of a wide array of enterprise applications.

WD, a Western Digital company, and world leader in storage solutions for the connected life, today introduced My Passport Pro, the first portable, Thunderbolt-powered dual-drive solution, providing creative professionals and enthusiasts high performance and capacity in a truly mobile solution. For Mac systems, My Passport Pro has user-selectable RAID functionality to deliver needed performance for the most demanding applications in the field, without the need for power adapters or extra cables. My Passport Pro is available in 2 TB and 4 TB capacities.

"The only Thunderbolt dual-drive solution that's bus-powered, WD's My Passport Pro enhances the workflow of mobile creative professionals by providing fast transfers and data protection for the large amounts of digital content they generate outside the studio," said Jim Welsh, executive vice president of branded products and worldwide sales, WD. "From photographers, videographers and musicians to graphic designers and architects, people who depend on portable storage for their livelihood will find My Passport Pro defines a new level of performance, reliability and especially portability."

WD, a Western Digital company and storage industry leader, today announced the availability of WD Purple, a purpose-built line of 3.5-inch, high-capacity hard drives for surveillance applications. Designed specifically for video surveillance units, WD Purple hard drives excel in new and existing home and small business security environments with up to eight hard drives and up to 32 high-definition (HD) video cameras. Shipping today, WD Purple hard drives are available in capacities from 1 TB up to 4 TB.

"By expanding our 'Power of Choice' product portfolio with WD Purple, we make it simple for our VARs, integrators and consumers to select the right drive engineered for their application and validated with our industry leading surveillance partners," said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president and general manager of WD's Storage Technology group. "WD optimized the WD Purple line of hard drives for surveillance applications to improve high-definition video playback, and operate in 24x7 workloads of surveillance environments."

HGST, a Western Digital company, today announced that it is shipping its new MegaScale DC 4000.B, a 3.5-inch, 4 TB, 6 Gb/s SATA hard disk drive (HDD). As the company's second-generation MegaScale drive, the new MegaScale DC 4000.B has been further optimized based on customer feedback to meet the explosive growth of infrequently accessed data, while balancing the right mix of power, capacity, performance and reliability. As part of a tiered storage strategy, the MegaScale DC 4000.B is designed for low-workload applications such as bulk storage for unstructured or big data, disk-to-disk backup, online archives, or long-term data retention where cost-per-GB, watt-per-GB and GB-per-square foot are critical parameters.

"With the explosive adoption of free email, social networks and Internet services, the capacity requirements for cloud and hyperscale data centers are growing astronomically. These environments are constantly looking for ways to improve their storage infrastructure costs and the bottom line," said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST. "As a leading drive supplier to some of the world's largest cloud data center providers, we understand the demanding storage requirements for low workload applications in these hyperscale environments. With the MegaScale DC 4000.B, we're delivering massive capacity in a low-power, performance-optimized drive to help customers achieve superior capital savings, operational efficiencies and energy conservation in the data center."

WD, a Western Digital company and a world leader in storage solutions for the connected life, today introduced its new My Cloud family of personal cloud solutions. WD's My Cloud is a complete solution for users to organize, centralize and secure the digital content from all of their computers and mobile devices and access those files from any device, from anywhere in the world. By simply connecting a My Cloud personal cloud drive to the Internet, consumers get the anywhere, any-device access they can get from the public cloud, without having to pay monthly fees or giving up control of their personal data.

"We believe that there's no place like home for the cloud," said Jim Welsh, executive vice president and general manager of WD's branded products and consumer electronics groups. "Everyone is inundated with thousands of digital files scattered across multiple computers and mobile devices, and controlling that chaos is a challenge. WD's personal cloud is the easiest, most secure and most affordable way for customers to control that chaos, with access to all of their files anywhere, anytime."

Buffalo has today announced the HD-LCU3 Series a new line of external hard drives that goes up to 4 TB in terms of capacity. Coming in black and white (the white models top 3 TB, while the black ones reach 4 TB), the fresh drives measure 187 x 120 x 39 mm, they weigh about 1 kg, and feature USB 3.0 connectivity, an internal anti-vibration system, no active cooling, and a casing that allows both vertical and horizontal installation. Moreover, using the TurboPC EX2 software, users can activate the HDD's 'Save Mode' which compresses the data transferred to it so as to fit in more content.

The 1 TB, 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB HD-LCU3 Series drives will arrive at the end of this month priced at 13,125 yen (~ 134 USD), 16,485 yen (~ 169 USD), 22,050 yen (~ 225 USD) and 38,850 yen (~ 397 USD), respectively.