Since its introduction in 2004, millions around the world have trusted WD My Passport drives to store and back up their lives' most precious memories and valuable data. To commemorate this milestone anniversary of its most popular drive, Western Digital Corp. is launching the WD My Passport Ultra, 20th Emerald Anniversary Edition. Over the lifetime of the My Passport drives, Western Digital has provided approximately 180 exabytes of data storage for users worldwide, equivalent to up to 18 billion hours of HD video, up to 46 trillion photos, or up to 35 trillion songs.

Prior to the initial introduction of the WD My Passport drive, users had limited options when it came to taking important files with them on the go, having to sacrifice a power outlet and downtime to add and transfer data. In 2004, My Passport delivered a streamlined solution: portable products that offered an impressive amount of storage for many types of digital files - including videos, music, photos, and documents. What started as a simple solution with 40 GB capacity has increased by up to 150 times to now having the world's highest capacity 2.5" portable hard drive with 6 TB of storage, meeting the needs of the modern digital consumer.

Toshiba Electronic Components Taiwan Corporation (Toshiba) has announced next-generation S300 Pro Surveillance Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) targeting the latest requirements in the surveillance storage market. With capacities up to 10 TB and double the buffer size of their predecessors, the upgraded HDDs with conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology enable surveillance system integrators, system installation providers, and end users to record, store and analyze their video streams from up to 64 high-definition (HD) cameras.

The highly scalable, 3.5-inch S300 Pro series, with capacity options of 4 TB, 6 TB, 8 TB and 10 TB, now supports up to 24 bays, and delivers reliable operation even in the most demanding environments, making the HDDs an excellent fit for large-scale video recording systems. Compared to the previous generation, they provide a higher maximum sustained transfer speed of 268MiB/s and double the cache buffer size to 512MiB. They also reduce power consumption, delivering improved total cost of ownership (TCO).

TrendForce expects that memory suppliers will continue their strategy of scaling back production of both DRAM and NAND Flash in 2024, with the cutback being particularly pronounced in the financially struggling NAND Flash sector. Market demand visibility for consumer electronic is projected to remain uncertain in 1H24. Additionally, capital expenditure for general-purpose servers is expected to be weakened due to competition from AI servers. Considering the low baseline set in 2023 and the current low pricing for some memory products, TrendForce anticipates YoY bit demand growth rates for DRAM and NAND Flash to be 13% and 16%, respectively. Nonetheless, achieving effective inventory reduction and restoring supply-demand balance next year will largely hinge on suppliers' ability to exercise restraint in their production capacities. If managed effectively, this could open up an opportunity for a rebound in average memory prices.

PC: The annual growth rate for average DRAM capacity is projected at approximately 12.4%, driven mainly by Intel's new Meteor Lake CPUs coming into mass production in 2024. This platform's DDR5 and LPDDR5 exclusivity will likely make DDR5 the new mainstream, surpassing DDR4 in the latter half of 2024. The growth rate in PC client SSDs will not be as robust as that of PC DRAM, with just an estimated growth of 8-10%. As consumer behavior increasingly shifts toward cloud-based solutions, the demand for laptops with large storage capacities is decreasing. Even though 1 TB models are becoming more available, 512 GB remains the predominant storage option. Furthermore, memory suppliers are maintaining price stability by significantly reducing production. Should prices hit rock bottom and subsequently rebound, PC OEMs are expected to face elevated SSD costs. This, when combined with Windows increasing its licensing fees for storage capacities at and above 1 TB, is likely to put a damper on further growth in average storage capacities.

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.

Toshiba announces the DT02-V Series of Surveillance HDDs, its new series created for digital video recorder (DVR) and network video recorder (NVR) platforms. The new series utilizes the latest magnetic recording technologies to achieve high areal density, helping to improve reliability compared to the prior MD04ABA-V Series. With up to 6 TB capacity, the new DT02-V Series supports a maximum of 32 high-resolution camera streams and is suitable for use in leading surveillance DVR and NVR platforms with as many as eight drive bays.

"Our latest surveillance HDD family, the DT02-V Series, delivers up to 6 TB of storage capacity, and is designed for use with leading surveillance DVR and NVR platforms," says Shuji Takaoka, General Manager of Storage Products Sales & Marketing Division at Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation. "It also provides a variety of capacity options while improving reliability for high resolution surveillance video streams."

SK Hynix Inc. announced today that it has developed and starts mass-producing the world's first 128-Layer 1 Tb (Terabit) TLC (Triple-Level Cell) 4D NAND Flash, only eight months after the Company announced the 96-Layer 4D NAND Flash last year.

The 128-Layer 1 Tb NAND chip offers the industry's highest vertical stacking with more than 360 billion NAND cells, each of which stores 3 bits, per one chip. To achieve this, SK Hynix applied innovative technologies, such as "ultra-homogeneous vertical etching technology," "high-reliability multi-layer thin-film cell formation technology," and ultra-fast low-power circuit design, to its own 4D NAND technology.

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.

Microsoft is seemingly going to introduce another version of their Windows 10 operating system. After introducing Windows 10 S earlier in the year, followed by the "Chinafinitive" Windows 10 China Government Edition, the company is seemingly responding to specific market demands of professionals and enterprises. The new Windows 10 Pro for Workstation PCs (which was first leaked by Microsoft itself through an erroneous upload to the Insider Program) will apparently come in two variants, a standard variant, and the N variant, which is built to comply with EU regulations.

The new Windows 10 Pro for Workstation PCs will introduce ReFS, the successor to the tried and true NTFS file system. The new ReFS is designed for fault-tolerance and is optimized for handling large data volume, including auto-correcting capabilities and backwards-compatibility with NTFS. Additionally, Microsoft is baking in SMB Direct protocol file sharing in Windows 10 Pro for Workstation which allows for high throughput, low latency and low CPU utilization when accessing network shares. It will also introduce support for systems with up to four CPUs (up from Windows 10 and Windows 10 Pro dual CPU limit) and 6 TB of RAM.

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.

Toshiba's Digital Products Division (DPD), a division of Toshiba America Information Systems, Inc., today introduced a 6 TB capacity for the Toshiba Canvio Desk 3.5" External USB 3.0 Hard Drive and Toshiba Desk 3.5" Internal Serial ATA 3.0 Hard Drive, devices that provide a convenient and reliable way to increase the storage capacity of your computer either as an upgrade or extension of your computer.

The Canvio Desk external hard drive is preloaded with software to make backup fast and simple. The system recovery software scans your system and recommends the best coverage for your computer. Choose between backing up your files to the cloud or backing up your files and folders to your Canvio Desk hard drive. "Toshiba has been developing and manufacturing hard drives for more than 20 years," said Maciek Brzeski, Vice President of Branded Storage Products, Toshiba Digital Products Division. "The time is right to upgrade our offerings not only to meet, but to exceed consumers' expectations by expanding the offerings of our internal and external 3.5" hard drives."

WD, a Western Digital company and world leader in storage today introduced new datacenter hard drives that deliver to today's modern datacenter architects the lowest power consumption of any high-capacity 3.5-inch hard drive available today. The WD Re+ hard drive family is the newest component of WD's full, tiered portfolio of high-capacity datacenter storage devices. Further expanding that portfolio will be 6 terabyte (TB) capacities for WD's popular WD Re and WD Se datacenter product lines, providing customers a spectrum of capabilities, tiered to their varied demands of application intensity, power optimization and cost efficiency.

In the modern datacenter, the total cost of ownership (TCO) formula is comprised of capacity, price, power consumption and the relationships between these variables. The WD Re+ drive provides the most power efficient and high-intensity high-capacity platform available today. With power consumption a primary consideration in today's large web-scale cloud infrastructures, and the WD Re+ drive consuming only 6 watts for 6 TB, customers' TCOs increase and savings for large deployments could be millions of dollars per year.

Seagate Technology today announced its new Enterprise NAS HDD - a high capacity drive targeting businesses seeking to optimize their computing for performance and reliability using Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems. With enterprise reliability and NAS optimized performance in up to 16-bays, the Enterprise NAS drive is available in capacities up to an industry-leading 6TB, and is designed to perform at high levels even under demanding workloads and in environments that call for global availability and 24x7 accessibility.

"As the industry moves deeper into the cloud era, all businesses need solutions that enable applications to be accessed anywhere at any time," said Scott Horn, Seagate vice president of marketing. "With our portfolio of NAS products, we can effectively target the needs of all types of businesses and scale with them as they grow in size. These drives are tailored to the requirements of businesses, ensuring customers have choices so they are only paying for the features they need."

WD, a Western Digital company, and world leader in storage solutions, today announced the expansion of its award-winning WD Red line of SATA hard drives for home and small office NAS (network attached storage) systems with the release of a 5 TB and first-to-market 6 TB capacity for NAS-specific storage and the introduction of WD Red Pro hard drives that address the medium to large business NAS market. Compatibility-tested with top NAS system manufacturers and optimized for power and performance, WD Red 3.5-inch hard drives are now shipping in 1 TB to 6 TB capacities; and the new WD Red Pro 3.5-inch hard drives are available in 2 TB to 4 TB capacities.

"With the expansion and evolution of the WD Red family, WD once again is providing its loyal customers with increased capacity up to 6 TB; improved bay count support with up to 8 bays; increased product breadth with WD Red Pro; and more features with the latest generation of NASware technology," said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president and general manager, WD Storage Technology. "WD continues to listen to its customers and bring exciting innovation to the category they helped to create."

Apricorn, a leading designer and manufacturer of data security products for business, military, and government, has raised the bar by elevating the security level of their workhorse desktop drive. The combination of USB 3.0 speed, high-capacity storage (up to 6 TB), and FIPS 140-2 Level 2 validated security makes this drive one of the most user-friendly/hacker-hostile data storage units in existence.

"Reports of lost or stolen unsecured drives are a daily occurrence," said Mike McCandless, VP of Sales and Marketing at Apricorn. "A seemingly small breach like a single unsecured drive that's lost or stolen from a medical office can translate to tens of thousands of private confidential records becoming anything but private and confidential."

G-Technology, a leader in delivering premium storage solutions for audio/video production, photography and the creative professional market, today announced the first products in its new Studio line - the G-RAID Studio and G-SPEED Studio. Continuing G-Technology's popular design legacy, the Studio family comes in new high-quality, sleek black enclosure for today's high-performance computers and workstations.

The Studio line features multiple RAID options, removable enterprise-class 7,200 RPM drives, 20 gigabits per second (Gbps) Thunderbolt 2 interfaces, and the industry's highest capacity 6 TB hard disk drives (HDDs) for pre- and post-production workflows.

Seagate Technology plc, a world leader in storage solutions, today announced it is now shipping the world's fastest 6 TB hard disk drive (HDD) - the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD v4. Boasting industry-leading performance, the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD v4 is an important step forward in scale-out data infrastructures delivering supersize storage and enterprise reliability to meet the explosive growth of corporate and cloud-based data centers.

"Unstructured data growth is doubling exponentially and will propel the digital universe to reach 16 Zettabytes of data by as early as 2017. This will cause cloud service providers to look for innovative ways to store more within an existing footprint while lowering operational costs," said Scott Horn, Seagate vice president of marketing. "Seagate is poised to address this challenge by offering the fastest 6 TB enterprise capacity HDD based on our proven, reliable platform meeting this never-ending demand in both private and public cloud data centers."

Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, today announced that the company has entered a partnership with Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST), a leading HDD provider, to deploy the new HGST Ultrastar He6 6 terabyte (TB) helium-filled hard disk drives (HDDs) into its storage systems. Being one of the first vendors across the world to employ HGST's helium-filled HDDs, which feature the largest capacity in the industry, Huawei is dedicated to providing storage products and solutions with high capacities and reduced power consumption.

"Huawei is very glad to collaborate with HGST in the helium-filled hard drive domain. With a high-density design, the integration of this technology into Huawei's storage systems, will enable us to provide customers with storage products and solutions that offer bigger capacity, higher efficiency and lower power-consumption," said Mr. Fan Ruiqi, President of Storage Product Line, Huawei Enterprise.

HGST, a Western Digital company, today announced that it is shipping the 6 TB Ultrastar He6 hard disk drive (HDD). Key OEM, cloud and research leaders working closely with HGST to qualify the drive include HP, Netflix, Huawei Unified Storage, CERN, Green Revolution Cooling and Code42, as well as some of the world's largest social media and search companies.

Revealed in September 2012, HGST's cutting-edge HelioSeal platform provides a path for higher capacity storage for decades to come while significantly lowering customer total cost of ownership (TCO). Leveraging the inherent benefits of helium, which is one-seventh the density of air, the new Ultrastar He6 drive features HGST's innovative 7Stac disk design with 6 TB, making it the world's highest capacity HDD with the best TCO for cloud storage, massive scale-out environments, disk-to-disk backup, and replicated or RAID environments.