Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it is being recognized for its environmental reliability by receiving the industry's first Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) certificate in Korea with its 512Gb 64-layer 3bit V-NAND and 860 EVO 4TB SSD.

The Environmental Product Declaration is a national certification system in Korea which recognizes a product's performance according to seven key environmental metrics including carbon footprint, resource footprint, ozone depletion, acidification, eutrophication, photochemical smog, and water footprint.

The growth momentum for 2H18 NAND Flash market is expected to be weak, according to the latest report of DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce. Coupled with continuous improvements in yield rate and output of 64/72-layer 3D NAND Flash, DRAMeXchange expects the market to approach a balance between supply and demand, the contract prices of NAND Flash products are expected to decline further.

The contract prices of NAND Flash products have been decreasing for two consecutive quarters in 1H18 due to the traditional off-season and capacity expansion of 64/72-layer 3D NAND Flash. During this period, suppliers provided competitive prices for high-density products to boost the memory content per box, aiming to further improve the demand in peak season. Meanwhile, suppliers have postponed further plans of capacity expansion, hoping to moderate the price decline.

In their recent earnings call, Micron commented that they have 96-layer 3D NAND technology on track for volume shipments in the second half of 2018. Most of today's SSDs typically use 32-layer technology, with 64-layer flash chips used in some recent releases like the Crucial MX500. 96-layer is the third generation of 3D NAND and increases storage capacity per chip even further which allows smaller and more energy efficient mobile devices to be built. Of course it will be cheaper too, compared to current-generation 64 layer NAND, which should bring SSD pricing down even more, and of course generally help pricing of consumer products which use flash memory.

The second important note from the presentation is that Micron expects 1X nm (18 nm) DRAM production to exceed that of previous generations before the end of this year. Their next-generation 1Y nm (15/16 nm) DRAM is on track to begin production shipments in the second half of 2018, too. As they noted in a previous event, their product and process roadmap for DRAM 1z looks solid and 1-alpha development programs already under way.

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has launched the industry's highest capacity NVMe solid state drive (SSD) based on the incredibly small Next-generation Small Form Factor (NGSFF) - an eight-terabyte (TB) NF1 SSD. The new 8TB NVMe NF1 SSD has been optimized for data-intensive analytics and virtualization applications in next-generation data centers and enterprise server systems.

"By introducing the first NF1 NVMe SSD, Samsung is taking the investment efficiency in data centers to new heights," said Sewon Chun, senior vice president of Memory Marketing at Samsung Electronics. "We will continue to lead the trend toward enabling ultra-high density data centers and enterprise systems by delivering storage solutions with unparalleled performance and density levels."

Today Toshiba Memory America, Inc., the U.S.-based subsidiary of Toshiba Memory Corporation, unveiled a new, game-changing category of SAS SSDs expected to replace SATA SSDs in server applications. The RM5 12Gbit/s value SAS (vSAS) series features capacity, performance, reliability, manageability and data security advantages - at a price that obsoletes SATA SSDs.

A homogeneous SAS environment has long been the gold standard for enterprise server and storage systems. With vertical integration expertise in flash technology, firmware and controller design, Toshiba leveraged its leading position as the world's leading SAS SSD line optimizing RM5 to close the cost gap with SATA - and usher in a new class of SSD. SATA simply cannot compete with SAS, falling well short in terms of performance, robustness and encryption options.

Kingston's UV500 family of SSDs debuted last April with capacities ranging from 120 GB all the way up to 960 GB. However, Kingston has decided to add a 2 TB model to the existing lineup due to increasing demands for higher capacity drives. Like its siblings, the 2 TB model also employs the Marvell 88SS1074 controller and 3D TLC NAND. It will also carry the same features like support for 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption and TCG Opal 2.0. While the 120 GB, 240 GB, and 480 GB models are available in 2.5-inch, M.2, and mSATA formats, the 2 TB model only comes in the 2.5-inch form factor. In terms of performance, the 2 TB variant delivers sequential read and write speeds up to 520 MB/s and 500MB/s, respectively. It also offers 4 KB random read performance up to 79,000 IOPS and 4 KB write performance up to 50,000 IOPS. Backed by a 5-year warranty, the UV500 2 TB SSD is priced at $695.50 according to Kingston's website.

Silicon Power introduced the AIC3C0P, an industrial-grade PCI-Express NVMe SSD in the half-height add-in card form-factor, with PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface. Available in capacities of 800 GB, 1.6 TB, and 3.2 TB, the drive features MLC NAND flash. It offers sequential transfer rates of up to 3200 MB/s reads, with up to 1850 MB/s writes, and 4K random access speeds of up to 750,000 IOPS reads, and up to 380,000 IOPS writes. Also on offer is power-loss protection, and native 256-bit AES data encryption. The company didn't reveal pricing.

Even as researchers expect 3D NAND flash to achieve the 140-layer level by 2021, technology and manufacturers still have to take all the intermediate steps before we're actually there. In that sense, Western Digital has just announced that they're well on their way in producing 96-layer 3D NAND and distributing it to customers. For now, the memory will be used for inexpensive storage solutions, but the idea is to eventually ramp um production for other, higher-performance products.

Western Digital CEO Steve Milligan kept the production ramp-up (and the expectation of BiCS4 production eventually surpassing BiCS3) under wraps, but it seems all is going well with the production. He added that "(...) if you look to where we at from a yield curve perspective, because [BICS4] is not too mature, we are very pleased with where we are. Because once you get to a certain point, you can project where you are going to end at (based on cycles of learning, etc)." As announced by Western Digital before, it's likely this initial production run is delivering 256 Gb capacity chips, with improvements in yields to allow for increased capacity down the road, eventually, up to 1 Tb capacity per chip.

COLORFUL Technology Company Limited, professional manufacturer of graphics cards, motherboards and high-performance storage solutions is proud to announce the addition of two new options for its CN600S line of solid-state drives. COLORFUL is adding the CN600S 240GB and CN600S 480GB drives featuring Intel 64-layer 3D NAND. Those looking for a cost-effective high-performance, high-capacity storage solution for low-profile applications including notebooks and other M.2 capable devices. The improved speed and capacity of the COLORFUL CN600S allows it to be used in a wider range of applications including gaming, professional use or HTPC.

The COLORUL CN600S is equipped with the SMI 2263XT controller, features a M.2 2280 design standard and is rated for transfer speeds up to 2 GB/s reads and 1.5 GB/s write performance. The SMI 2263XT uses the PCIe Gen3 x4 interface and can deliver 4x faster performance than SATA3 for reading, accessing and opening applications and games. The COLORFUL CN600 M.2 PCIe SSD is focused in offering the most compelling cost-benefit ratio in the market.

3D NAND has been one of the most important new technologies in allowing for greater storage density in space-constrained hardware (isn't that always the case, though?) As we've stepped away from the usual 2D NAND to the nowadays market-leading 3D solutions, which stack layers of memory one on top of the other (thus making use of vertical space instead of the usually more costly horizontal one), memory density and price per GB has been steadily declining - a relationship that isn't quite as parallel as it may seem, but still occurs.

COLORFUL Technology Company Limited, professional manufacturer of graphics cards, motherboards and high-performance storage solutions is proud to announce the expansion of its storage offering with the addition of its largest capacity solid-state drive to date. COLORFUL is announcing the availability of the SL500 960 GB SSD which will join the fast-growing line-up of COLORFUL high-performance, high-speed storage solutions.

With the introduction of the SL500 960 GB, gamers, power users and professionals seeking high-speed storage with plenty of capacity for various workloads including modern games, large multimedia files and expansive data can be served rapidly. The 960 GB capacity of the SL500 makes it an ideal choice for those individuals that don't want to compromise performance and capacity.

TDK Corporation announces the sequential launch of the embedded SD ESRD4 series, the embedded SSD ESS1B series and the M.2 SSD Type 2280-D5-B-M SNS1B series. With the progress of IoT, the demand for micro storage for edge data is rapidly expanding. In particular, eMMC, which can be mounted on a surface, was expected to be potent, but the trend is shifting from eMMC to UFS, which is associated with the larger capacity of smartphones.

On the other hand, a reliable and appropriate storage capacity is required for I-IoT that usually uses a small capacity. TDK's embedded SD ESRD4 series is a SD card, equipped with a highly durable SLC/pSLC NAND flash that can be implemented on boards. It covers a wide range of capacities from 1GB to 32GB, suitable for storing a lightweight system such as Linux and RTOS.

If there's one green, DIY upgrade path available for users far and wide right now is acquiring an SSD. With prices on RAM being crazy enough as they are (even if slightly better now compared to some months ago), and the finally cooling prices on graphics cards (due, in no small part, to this), the latest times have been hard for users looking for a straight upgrade. SSDs, however, provide one of the most impactful system upgrades for any kind of user's workload - and pricing on these has been as merry as merry can be, with a chance of improving even more in the future.

Micron today announced general availability of the 128GB and 256GB density of edge storage microSD card solutions and collaboration with several leading video surveillance solution providers to promote surveillance-grade edge storage. Built on Micron's industry-leading 64-layer 3D TLC NAND technology, the newly released solutions enable greater capacity in a smaller space, delivering up to 30 days of surveillance video storage in the camera itself.

Over 98 percent of all microSD cards sold globally in 2017 were used in consumer applications, according to IHS Markit. These consumer-grade memory cards are not designed and validated for commercial use in video surveillance applications. Micron's industrial microSD cards are designed specifically for professional video surveillance use cases and include a three-year warranty for 24x7 continuous video recording usage. The Micron microSD card design and firmware is optimized to ensure a reliable, robust and low-maintenance system design that delivers 24x7 continuous recording capability with minimum video frame drops.

PC gaming is increasingly immersive, with richer and more intense visual content than ever before, and gamers are faced with making technology choices to maximize their experience. To push leading-edge performance, lower power consumption and extended durability for PC gaming systems, Western Digital Corporation today introduced a high-performance Western Digital Black 3D NVMe SSD featuring the company's own SSD architecture and controller. The drive accelerates data for PC applications to enable users to quickly, access, engage and capture today's high-resolution video, audio and gaming content.

With growing demand for rich content, PCs must have the capability to run intensive applications and enable the 4K/Ultra HD graphics and video content experiences. To move this immense amount of data quickly and seamlessly, Western Digital developed a new breed of SSDs to help remove the traditional storage bottleneck. This M.2 drive features a new NVMe architecture and controller, which optimally integrates with Western Digital 3D NAND. Western Digital's new vertically integrated SSD platform was engineered from the ground up, specifically architected to help maximize performance for NVMe SSDs, with advanced power management, durability and endurance for the growing range of applications benefiting from NVMe technology.

Kingston Digital, Inc., the Flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., a world leader in memory products and technology solutions, today announced A1000 PCIe NVMe SSD. The M.2 drive is Kingston's first entry-level consumer-grade PCIe NVMe SSD utilizing 3D NAND. The A1000 delivers twice the performance of SATA at near SATA pricing.

The single-sided M.2 2280 (22mm x 80mm) form factor makes A1000 ideal for notebooks and systems with limited space. The PCIe NVMe drive features a Gen 3.0 x2 interface, 4-channel Phison 5008 controller, and 3D NAND Flash. It delivers 2x the performance of SATA SSDs with read/write speed up to 1500MB/s and 1000MB/s giving it exceptional responsiveness and ultra-low latency.

ADATA Technology, a leading manufacturer of high performance DRAM modules and NAND Flash products, today launched the XPG GAMMIX S11 (S11), its fastest gaming SSD to date. It arrives in a compact M.2 2280 form factor, is equipped with a unique heatsink to maintain optimal temperatures and sports the ultra-fast PCIe3x4 interface to deliver up to 3200MB/s read and 1700MB/s write - which is ideal for performance seekers, including gamers, PC DIY enthusiasts and graphics professionals. S11 employs the latest 2ndgeneration 64-layer 3D NAND Flash for improved reliability and ships in capacities of 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB.

Leveraging the ultra-fast PCIe Gen3x4 interface and the NVMe 1.3 protocol, the S11 offers a tremendous improvement in read/write performance. It implements a 32bit DRAM data bus, Intelligent SLC Caching, and a DRAM cache buffer, accelerating sequential and 4K random read/write speeds. It can reach speeds of up to 3200MB/s for reads and 1700MB/s for writes and 310K/280K IOPS random 4K read/writes for faster boot, shorter game loads, and system response time. In addition, XPG's custom-designed heatsink ensures temperatures are at least 10 degrees*(1) Celsius lower than non-shielded M.2 SSDs, providing enhanced stability and longevity.

Samsung Electronics has announced last Wednesday that they are planning to double their NAND memory output capacity in china. The announcement, done at a groundbreaking ceremony in its Xi'an fabrication facility in inland Shaanxi Province, should see some $7 billion invested over the course of three years. With this investment in both facilities and machinery, Samsung expected production capacity to roughly double from current values to some 220,000, 300 mm 3-D flash memory wafers by 2020.

The motives for this increased Samsung investment in mainland China are being put forward as a way for the South Korean giant to temper relationships with China, one of its greatest importers of NAND memory. Further investment into China likely assuages the country's protectionist policies, since at least it receives something back from its import volume. By investing further into a second assembly line at its Xi'an fabrication facility, Samsung is also looking to reduce risk derived from over-condensed manufacturing facilities in South Korea.

At the Open Compute project Summit, Intel previewed their upcoming Optane SSD DC P4801X, the company's true M.2, Optane-based SSD for enterprise deployments. Intel has managed to reduce the footprint for their flagship, U.2 form-factor Optane SSD DC P4800X, while increasing the available NAND capacity from their current caching solutions (800p and 900p Optane SSDs).

The new, upcoming M.2 SSD's controller features a 7-channel architecture to improve performance as much as possible, deployed in 375 GB drives, through use of seven quad-die packages of 3D XPoint memory. For the moment, there are no pricing or performance metrics to be talked about. However, this solution marks the first in a general consumer-available form-factor, and could be prototyped for a future, mainstream-hitting Optane SSD.

Marvell, a leader in storage, networking and connectivity semiconductor solutions, today announced that it is launching innovative NVM Express (NVMe)-based chipset solutions that will accelerate the time to market for application-optimized data center SSD implementations. These new, highly-versatile building blocks can optimally address current and emerging workload storage requirements, spanning capacity, latency, performance, power and cost, to enable tailored SSD solutions for specific cloud and enterprise workloads.

The proliferation of cloud services and new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, is driving various workloads in the data center. These evolving and expanding workloads can have differing storage requirements that emerging SSD form factors are targeted to address. Marvell has developed innovative NVMe chipsets capable of powering the larger Enterprise Data Storage Form Factors (EDSFF), Next Generation Small Form Factors (NGSFF) and various customized form factors, providing the ability to increase storage capacity, performance and overall workload efficiencies.

Nimbus Data, a pioneer in flash memory solutions, today announced the ExaDrive DC100, the largest capacity (100 terabytes) solid state drive (SSD) ever produced. Featuring more than 3x the capacity of the closest competitor, the ExaDrive DC100 also draws 85% less power per terabyte (TB). These innovations reduce total cost of ownership per terabyte by 42% compared to competing enterprise SSDs, helping accelerate flash memory adoption in both cloud infrastructure and edge computing.

"As flash memory prices decline, capacity, energy efficiency, and density will become the critical drivers of cost reduction and competitive advantage," stated Thomas Isakovich, CEO and founder of Nimbus Data. "The ExaDrive DC100 meets these challenges for both data center and edge applications, offering unmatched capacity in an ultra-low power design."

A power-outage on 9th March, at one of Samsung's NAND flash manufacturing plants located in Pyeongtaek, Korea, will have a notable impact on global NAND flash production. It reduced the global NAND flash output for the month of March 2018 by 3.5 percent, a number that isn't insignificant, and translates into non-volatile memory for millions of devices. It also trims Samsung's output by 11 percent for the month. SIlicon fabrication is a highly sensitive process, and the power-outage is said to have damaged up to 60,000 wafers of NAND flash chips.

The impact of this event on global prices of NAND flash memory, and devices based on it, remains to be seen. Any inflation could be nipped in the bud by Samsung and other NAND flash makers significantly increasing production through this quarter. Samsung will begin expansion of its NAND flash plant in Xi'an, China, which currently outputs 120,000 wafers per month, and is expected to put out 320,000 wafers a month after the expansion.

Addressing the needs of a growing landscape of Internet of Things (IoT) and Fast Data applications at the edge, Western Digital Corporation today announced two new NVMe SSDs - Western Digital PC SN720 and Western Digital PC SN520 - powered by a new NVMe storage architecture, scalable for a range of emerging implementations, from IoT and edge computing to mobile computing systems.

The new Western Digital NVMe client architecture and product portfolio will enable manufacturers of IoT devices, computing devices such as thin and light, 2-in-1 and embedded PCs and monitoring systems to enable the capture and transformation of the massive quantities of data in real-time at the edge of smart city, smart home and personal data environments. Cisco GCI estimates that nearly 850 zettabytes (ZB) will be generated by all people, machines and things by 2021. With the advent of high-bandwidth technologies like 5G, augmented reality and facial recognition, new applications can benefit from the exceptional performance, power efficiency and capacity of NVMe and Western Digital 3D NAND to deliver an optimal user experience.

Today, Intel announced the Intel SSD DC P4510 Series for data center applications. The P4510 Series uses 64-layer TLC Intel 3D NAND to enable end users to do more per server, support broader workloads and deliver space-efficient capacity. The P4510 Series enables up to four times more terabytes per server and delivers up to 10 times better random read latency at 99.99 percent quality of service than previous generations. The drive can also deliver up to double the input-output operations per second (IOPS) per terabyte. The 1 and 2TB capacities have been shipping to cloud service providers (CSPs) in high volume since August 2017, and the 4 and 8TB capacities are now available to CSPs and channel customers. All capacities are in the 2.5-inch 15 mm U.2 form factor and utilize a PCIe NVMe 3.0 x4 connection.

To accelerate performance and simplify management of the P4510 Series PCIe SSDs and other PCIe SSDs, Intel is also delivering two new technologies that work together to replace legacy storage hardware. Intel Xeon Scalable processors include Intel Volume Management Device (VMD), enabling robust management such as surprise insertion/removal and LED management of PCIe SSDs directly connected to the CPU. Building on this functionality, Intel Virtual RAID on CPU (VROC) uses Intel VMD to provide RAID to PCIe SSDs. By replacing RAID cards with Intel VROC, customers are able to enjoy up to twice the IOPs performance and up to a 70 percent cost savings with PCIe SSDs directly attached to the CPU, improving customer's return on their investments in SSD-based storage.

Micron has announced that they will be introducing QLC (Quad Level Cell) NAND-based, own brand drives for the server environment this year. The new QLC drives are expected to boost maximum storage density (and price per GB) closer to that of mechanical HDDs, which is why Micron is positioning drives based on this memory technology as data center-class SSDs for the nearline storage market. The company is positioning these drives as replacement options for 7,200 RPM HDDs for workloads that require heavy reads of stored information - thus offsetting QLC NAND's lower endurance when it comes to available maximum writes on the drives' cells.

It's a known trade-off when it comes to the NAND world: higher amounts of bits per cell to represent information means that there must be much increased accuracy when it comes to reading a given cell's voltage state. While SLC NAND only tracks two voltage states, MLC (2-bits per cell) tracks four voltage states, TLC doubles that to eight voltage states, and QLC doubles the ante again for a maximum 16 voltage states, where each voltage state represents data on the cell. Of course, with repeat writes and voltage changes, accuracy and capacity for the cell to maintain its given voltage tend to drop, which leads to incorrect information and thus corrupted data or those cells to be rendered inoperative. This is one of the reasons for manufacturers to include overprovisioning in their NAND-based solutions.