Samsung is the most well-regarded company when it comes to consumer SSDs. even if their SSD solutions do usually carry a premium versus the competition, that price delta is usually well justified: Samsung's SSDs are frequently the most reliable, fastest option in the market. Samsung's 960 PRO and 960 EVO SSDs have done a good job of clarifying the company's market positioning, and now, the successors for those Samsung SSDs have already surfaced.

The next-gen Samsung NVMe drives carry the PM981 code-name - where "PM" stands for TLC NAND (in this case, based on 64-layer 3-bit per cell V-NAND chips), "9" stands for Samsung's highest performing solutions, and "81" stands for the part number - two tiers ahead of Samsung's 960 series. It's expected that there will be a 970 part, since Samsung seems to be steering away from the "EVO" and "PRO" monikers to differentiate products according to performance - a straight numeral is expected to be the norm going forward. For now, the parts that have surfaced carry 512 GB and 1 TB of memory. These will make use of Samsung's Polaris V2 controller (with a metal heatsink over it to aid in cooling), and deliver 3,000 MB/s and 3,200 MB/s sequential read speeds (for the 512 GB and 1 TB versions respectively) and 1,800 MB/s and 2,400 MB/s sequential write, respectively. The models surfaced from a Vietnamese retailer, which has them going for $233 and $439 - which doesn't mean this will be the final consumer retail price, but seems reasonable for the technology and performance tier of these NVMe SSD solutions.

Phison has been working hard towards bringing to market a new, budget SSD controller in the form of its Phison E8 solution. The controller was designed with the purpose to try and dethrone Intel's 600p solutions from the budget, entry-level NVMe options, through offering increased performance at the same affordable prices. To do this, and so as to decrease power consumption, Phison opted for a PCIe 2x support for the E8 - this means the company is trading burst performance for decreased power consumption. E8-based SSDs are expected in capacities of 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB, with prices lower than the current 600p and Phison's own E7-based products like the MyDigitalSSD BPX.

The Phison E8 controller should still offer plenty of increased performance over a typical HDD, and has been designed to work with 3D NAND technology. even with the firmware in its non-final stages, Tom's Hardware is reporting that the Phison E8's performance is already higher than Intel's 600p and WD's Black PCIe solutions. As we all know, though, firmware optimizations are paramount to SSD controllers' performance, so we can only expect these performance numbers to go up. All in all, it seems we'll have yet another low-cost NVMe SSD solution in the market, though desktop users will likely opt for a PCIe 4x solution, since that environment doesn't care about power consumption as much as a mobile solution would.

Intel today announced the SSD 545s line of mainstream SATA solid-state drives. Built in the 7 mm-thick 2.5-inch form-factor with SATA 6 Gbps interface, the drives combine new 64-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory by IMFlash Technology, with a Silicon Motion SMI SM2259 controller, and a custom firmware by Intel. For now, the drive is only available in one capacity, 512 GB. It offers sequential transfer speeds of up to 550 MB/s, with up to 500 MB/s sequential writes; 4K random read performance of up to 75,000 IOPS, 4K random write performance of up to 85,000 IOPS, and endurance of at least 144 TBW. Besides common SSD features such as NCQ and TRIM, the drive offers native 256-bit AES encryption. Available now, and backed by a 3-year warranty, the SSD 545s 512 GB is priced at USD $179.99.

BIOSTAR has announced an evolution of their G300 SSDs that it introduced in August 2016. The new, revised G330 series maintains the overall design from the series it supersedes, but upgrades the controller to an SMI 2258 (from an SMI 2256). They're built on Micron's 3D TLC NAND, with a DRAM cache that boosts performance, and come in three different capacities (128, 256 and 512 GB) in a 2.5-inch form factor, with a 6.8 mm height.

The drives feature read speeds up to 565MB/s and write speeds up to 515MB/s over a SATA 6Gb/s interface, and come with a MSRP of $59 for the 128GB model (G330-128GB), $99 for the 256GB model (G330-256GB), and $169 for the 512GB model (G330-512GB).

Western Digital Corporation, a global storage technology and solutions leader, today introduced its fastest WD brand portable drive yet, the My Passport SSD. Featuring blazing-fast speeds and award-winning design, the new My Passport SSD compliments the company's leading portfolio of My Passport palm-sized storage devices. Designed for content creators and tech enthusiasts, the new My Passport SSD combines exceptional speed and portability to manage massive files on the go.

"The WD brand is focused on delivering fresh, new personal storage devices that offer amazing performance in a beautiful, yet durable design," said Sven Rathjen, vice president of marketing, Client Solutions, Western Digital. "Our fastest portable drive yet, the My Passport SSD is a powerful solution for people who need to move content quickly and easily wherever life takes them."

At CES 2017, Plextor announced their next SSD product line. Dubbed the M8Se, these will be restricted to NVMe SSDs with 15nm 3-bit-per-cell TLC of Toshiba manufacture, ranging from 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB and 1TB capacities leveraged by Marvell's Eldora controller.

The new mid-range NVMe SSD uses a new heatsink design (slight cost-reduction when compared with the one the M8Pe carries), that Plextor says will improve cooling by up to 20% - convenient, since throttling does happen with NVMe based SSDs - and particularly with Marvell's Eldora controller - as it did with Plextor's M8Pe line of SSDs. The card also features blue accent lighting. Plextor will also sell a heatsink-less M8PeGN model in the M.2 form factor.