Plextor, one of the most iconic names in PC storage once known for high performance and quality, has announced it will cease operations. Parent company Kioxia has decided to retire the Plextor brand name for solid state drives (SSDs). Instead, it will market products under its Solid State Storage Technology Corporation (SSSTC) brand going forward. The move comes after Kioxia acquired Plextor and its parent company Lite-On's SSD business back in 2019. Since then, Plextor has struggled to keep pace with new storage technologies. With PCIe Gen 4 and PCIe Gen 5 SSD controllers coming to market, Plextor failed to adopt the new Phison and InnoGrit platforms, instead sticking with Marvell controllers, lagging behind at that time.

Now, SSSTC and Kioxia will strictly focus SSD sales on the enterprise, data center, and industrial segments rather than the consumer market. The Plextor website is already redirecting to SSSTC.com, which no longer lists any drives for client PCs. While current Plextor SSD owners will continue to receive warranty support and RMA services, no new Plextor drives are expected to be released. The company had a history stretching back over 30 years of making top-performing optical disk drives and SSDs. Similarly to OCZ after its acquisition by Toshiba, the Plextor name will now fade into history. But in the fast-moving storage business, companies live and die by their ability to adopt cutting-edge technologies. Hence, companies are always on the edge of their seats, trying to survive.

Toshiba subsidiary OCZ rolled out the XS700 series portable SSDs. Measuring 95 mm x 75 mm x 11 mm, the drive is only slightly bigger than an internal 2.5-inch drive, and features an aluminium body with diamond-cut edges. The drive features USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) interface, with backwards compatibility to older USB generations. A single cable plugging into the drive's type-C connector provides both power and host connectivity.

Under the hood, the OCZ XS700 features Toshiba-made 3D BiCS TLC NAND flash memory. It comes in only a 240 GB capacity for now, which offers sequential reads of up to 530 MB/s, and sequential write speeds of up to 480 MB/s. The drive appears to feature two components, a Phison S11 DRAM-less controller wired to the NAND flash, connected over SATA 6 Gbps to a VIA Labs VL715 chip that connects it to the USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface. You also get USB-attached SCSI protocol (UASP) support, to speed things up. The drive is backed by a 3-year warranty, and is expected to be priced around $200, when it hits the shelves later this month.

Toshiba throughout 2017 made big moves in the flash storage industry, particularly its bitter falling out with WD/SanDisk. The company today is more innovative than ever. Its 2018 International CES booth had a mix of products by the original Toshiba digital storage products division, and its client-focused, US-based, former OCZ division. The star-attraction isn't some big PCIe add-on card SSD that can push a dozen terabytes per second; but the modest RC100 M.2 NVMe drive. Drives like it could make NVMe storage affordable for upper-mainstream gaming PC builders throughout 2018.

The RC100 has been exhaustively detailed in one of our older articles. It's an M.2-2242 drive with PCIe gen 3.0 x2 interface, and more than triple the transfer rates of the fastest SATA SSD you can find. This drive will be gulped down by both the DIY and OEM markets. Next up, is the TR200 entry-level SATA SSD launched last October, targeted at those still clinging onto HDDs or first-time builders. It features Toshiba's 64-layer TLC NAND flash to achieve some of the lowest price-per-gigabyte ratios.

Toshiba's first retail SSDs to use the company's 64-layer BiCS3 3D NAND technology have been announced by Toshiba. The successors to the company's Trion 100 and Trion 150 SSDs still carry some vestiges of OCZ branding in the product logo and TR (short for Trion) moniker. This is Toshiba's first generation of mainstream, mass-market-suitable 3D NAND flash.

These drives make use of a DRAM-less controller design, and will be available in capacities ranging from 240 GB up to 960 GB. Toshiba advertises 550 MB/s read and 525 MB/s write speeds. 4K Random Read IOPS stand at 87K, while 4K Random Write IOPS go up to 87K. The endurance on the models will range from 60 to 240 TB according to capacity, and these carry the same three-year warranty as previous Trion SSDs. Pricing has not yet been announced, although the TR200 series will start shipping to retailers this fall.

No, that isn't a major typo on this article's headline. According to print magazine c't, who conducted a test bench consisting of two pieces each of OCZ's TR150, Crucial's BX 200, Samsung's 750 Evo, Samsung's 850 Pro, SanDisk's Extreme Pro and SanDisk's Ultra II, the last SSD to actually give out the last breath was Samsung's 256 GB 850 Pro, with a staggering 9100 TB (that's 9.1 Petabytes) written. This is well beyond Samsung's suggested longevity for this particular SSD, which stands at 150 TBW.

The first particular model to give out was one of Crucial's BX 200, at 187 TBW (still more than twice over the manufacturer's 80 TBW). The second model to fail was the second Crucial BX 200, at 280 TBW. The remaining SSDs apparently died after a power peak (unclear whether a surge or a spike), save for the Pro models, in the form of SanDisk's Extreme Pro and Samsung's 850 Pro (it seems those Pro-oriented features do serve some purpose, eh?.) One of these SanDisk Extreme Pro models lasted for about 2,200 TBW, the same amount of writes the first Samsung 850 Pro model endured. However, the second Samsung 850 Pro broke through all records with its total 9,100 TB written. Naturally, these are interesting and impressive overall results, but they can't really be counted upon as being statistically significant; two models each aren't enough to achieve a representation of the tested SSD models' endurance. However, this also probably means that save a defect on your SSD's manufacturing, you can count on it for a considerable amount of writes.

Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC), a committed technology leader, today announces the launch of the OCZ TL100 SATA solid state drive (SSD) series. Designed for entry-level users with traditional hard disk drive (HDD) storage seeking an affordable upgrade solution, the Toshiba OCZ TL100 series provides the performance of SSD technology at an attractive price point.

Offering an easy and affordable way for value-oriented users to enhance their mobile or desktop systems, Toshiba OCZ TL100 SSDs improve home/office computing experiences, enabling increased system responsiveness and productivity over hard drives. With Toshiba TLC NAND flash memory under the hood, the TL100 series prioritizes both quality and affordability delivering the reliable system storage end users can rely on.

Toshiba company OCZ today announced the new VX500 line of performance SSDs in the 2.5-inch form-factor, featuring SATA 6 Gb/s interface. The drives are based on a new-generation platform by OCZ's parent company Toshiba. The drives combine Toshiba TC358790 controller with 15 nm MLC NAND flash memory chips by Toshiba. The drives come in capacities of 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB, and offer price/GB comparable to TLC NAND flash-based drives; yet with performance comparable to high-end MLC NAND flash drives.

All four variants offer up to 550 MB/s sequential reads. The 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB variants offer up to 485 MB/s, 510 MB/s, 515 MB/s, and 515 MB/s of sequential writes, respectively. Random access performance is rated around 90,000 IOPS reads, with up to 65,000 IOPS writes. The 128 GB variant is priced at US $63.99, the 256 GB variant at $92.79, the 512 GB variant at $152.52, and the 1 TB variant at $337.06. The drives are backed by 5-year warranty. Acronis TrueImage disk cloning software comes included.Read our review of the VX500 512GB here.

OCZ is refining its popular consumer SSD brands to reach out to more buyers. As part of the integration with Toshiba, they rebranded their consumer SSD lines, to VT180, and the TR150, which more closely aligns with Toshiba's SSD model naming. Besides the naming, both drives are identical to the Vector 180 and Trion 150. The VT180 comes in capacities ranging from 120 GB to 960 GB, and is powered by Toshiba-made MLC NAND flash. These drives offer sequential transfer rates of up to 550 MB/s reads, with up to 530 MB/s writes, and 96,000 IOPS 4K random reads, with 90,000 IOPS 4K random writes. The TR150, on the other hand, runs TLC NAND flash memory, and although its maximum sequential speeds are rated the same as the VT180 series, their 4K random access numbers are different - 87,000 IOPS reads, and 83,000 IOPS writes.

Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc., a committed technology leader, today announces the Toshiba OCZ RD400 Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) solid state drive (SSD) series. Designed for cutting-edge notebooks and PCs, the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) RD400 series provides improved storage bandwidth and enhanced latency resulting in a fast and responsive computing experience.

Unlike Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) based SSDs utilizing the legacy Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) protocol, NVMe is the first storage protocol designed with SSDs in mind making the RD400 series one of Toshiba's fastest consumer SSDs to date. Additionally, the RD400's PCIe Gen3 x4 lane interface shatters the traditional SATA bottleneck by delivering over four times the performance of SATA SSDs. The RD400 series features sequential read/write speeds of up to 2,600 MB/s and 1,600 MB/s and random read/write performance of up to 210,000 and 140,000 4KiB input/output operations per second (IOPS).

Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc., a committed technology leader, announces the immediate availability of dual-port functionality on OCZ's award-winning Z-Drive 6000 NVM Express (NVMe) Solid State Drive (SSD) series. The Z-Drive 6000's addition of dual port connection enables two host systems to concurrently access data from the same storage device or provides a redundant access path to the drive, providing SAS-like features such as High Availability (HA) that storage architects have come to rely on.

Now dual-ported, the Z-Drive 6000 series represents a complete solid-state storage solution that supports the real-time I/O needs of business-critical enterprise applications and virtual infrastructures which require high bandwidth and low latency performance, but also need redundancy. The Z-Drive 6000's dual port capabilities enable redundant data access that eliminates a single point of failure and when two hosts are using the same drive, maintains Quality of Service (QoS) in an event when one data path is compromised. In addition to the dual port upgrade, the Z-Drive 6000 series now includes feature enhancements such as multiple namespaces, non-binary sector sizes, and self-encrypting drive (SED) with Crypto Erase.

Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc., a committed technology leader, announces the availability of the new Trion 150 SSD series, an affordable performance upgrade for mainstream notebooks and desktops. Built with the Toshiba's 15 nm Triple-Level Cell (TLC) NAND flash technology from Toshiba, the Trion 150 series continues to deliver the superior balance of reliability, endurance and value of its predecessor, Trion 100, with increased real world performance.

Offering an easy and affordable way for entry-level users to enhance their mobile or desktop systems, Trion 150 SSDs provide a superior computing experience, enabling increased multitasking and productivity over traditional hard drives. Rated for sequential read speeds up to 550 MB/s, sequential write speeds up to 530 MB/s and random write I/O performance up to 91,000 IOPS, the Trion 150 series help improve boot time, system responsiveness and optimize storage operations.

Cooler Master, today announced the Case Mod World Series 2016, a competitive modding event designed to connect modders everywhere with US$30,000 in cash and prizes to be won. Cooler Master has brought together sponsors such as ASUS, Avexir, Dremel, NVIDIA, and OCZ to support and engage with the PC modding community. The Case Mod World Series is now in its seventh installment and this year, Cooler Master is expanding the scope of the series to include local meet and greets, and modding sessions.

"Modding has exploded in recent years and is taking root in every corner of the globe. The Case Mod World Series is about fuelling that growth. It's about igniting the modding spirit - the maker spirit - on the web and right in your community," said Michelle Wu, Global Community Manager. "This year, we will be running local events to involve modders everywhere. Together, with the generous support of our sponsors, we hope to enable the modding community the world over. "

OCZ Storage Solutions -- a Toshiba Group Company and provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced the introduction of Host Managed SSD (HMS) technology, first supported by the Saber 1000 Series SSDs. HMS technology enables Host controls over internal SSD background processing tasks that were previously not exposed to host-level software. System-level software control of background processing tasks, such as Garbage Collection, enable improving overall storage performance, and specifically enable obtaining consistent and predictable latency across a large pool of SSDs.

Hyperscale, Cloud, and datacenters now run software defined storage applications which manage large pools of SSDs across multiple servers. Consistent performance of these SSDs is critical to many modern applications, such as modern data bases and online trading, that have migrated to the Cloud. Exposing HMS functions via API enables integration of HMS functions into the storage stacks.

OCZ Storage Solutions, a Toshiba Group Company, today announced that its enterprise Z-Drive 4500 SSDs has achieved VMware Ready status. This designation indicates that after a detailed validation process, Z-Drive 4500 SSDs has achieved VMware's highest level of endorsement, and can be found on the VMware Solution Exchange (VSX) here.

"Driven by our Virtualized Controller Architecture Technology, the Z-Drive 4500 utilizes the full processing bandwidth of eight controllers working in unison which enables the storage subsystem to run more efficiently while delivering dominant small block / large block performance and low latency," said Bert Mauricio, director of Strategic Alliances, OCZ Storage Solutions. "By using Z-Drive 4500 SSDs with vSphere 5.x or 6.x, enterprises can deliver virtualized applications that can be accelerated while delivering fast and reliable access to data without burdening host CPU and memory resources."

OCZ announced the Trion 100, a new lineup of cost-effective SSD for first-time users graduating from HDDs, and for those who want fast read-intensive drives to replace storage HDDs in their systems. Some extremely low price-per-gigabyte figures build their case. The drive features 19 nm TLC NAND flash chips made by Toshiba, driven by a controller also made by Toshiba. This controller features an SLC-caching tech that deals with a small portion of the TLC NAND flash as SLC (by storing just one bit per cell), which has the maximum sequential transfer performance. The controller juggles hot-data in and out of this portion from the rest of the TLC area. Other controller features include DEVSLEEP mode support. In this mode, the drive draws just 6 mW of power. Other essentials such as TRIM and NCQ are also featured.

OCZ Trion 100 comes in four capacities - 120 GB, 240 GB, 480 GB, and 960 GB, priced at US $56.99, $87.99, $184.99, and $369.99, respectively. All four variants offer sequential read speeds of up to 550 MB/s, while the maximum sequential-write speeds are rated at 450 MB/s, 520 MB/s, 530 MB/s, and 530 MB/s, respectively. The maximum 4K random-read performance for the 120 GB variant is rated at 79,000 IOPS; while the other three offer up to 90,000 IOPS. Random-write performance figures for the four variants are 25,000 IOPS, 43,000 IOPS, 54,000 IOPS, and 64,000 IOPS, respectively. The drives are built in the 7 mm-thick 2.5-inch form-factor, with SATA 6 Gb/s interface. The drives ship with OCZ's SSDGuru software that lets you monitor the drive's health, update its firmware, and wipe it. OCZ is offering a 3-year warranty with these drives.Read our review of the OCZ Trion 100 480GB.

One of the three unexpected products based on the "Fiji" GPU, which AMD announced at its E3 event, Project Quantum, or the quest to design a 4K-worthy SFF gaming PC, which runs two "Fiji" GPUs in CrossFire, had the press assume that the rest of the system could be AMD-based, such as AMD-branded (albeit Patriot Memory manufactured) memory, AMD-branded (albeit OCZ manufactured) SSD; and importantly an AMD-made CPU or APU. Given its liquid-cooling, the prospect of a 95W "Godavari," or even upcoming "Carrizo" APU didn't seem far-fetched. Even a 95W FX CPU could have been deployed, since AM3+ on mini-ITX is not impossible.

When taken apart, Project Quantum was shown to be running an Intel Core i7-4790K "Devil's Canyon" CPU, on an ASRock-made mini-ITX motherboard, with its non-essential parts soldered out. The i7-4790K is neighbored by a pair of half-height Crucial Ballistix memory modules, which is excusable, since there are no half-height AMD Radeon memory modules, yet. The SSD is AMD-branded. The unit features a unified liquid cooling solution that's custom-made for AMD, by Asetek. A large (200 mm?) radiator, with a single fan, cools the CPU, the PCH, as well as the two "Fiji" GPUs.

OCZ Storage Solutions -- a Toshiba Group Company and the most awarded solid state drive (SSD) brand of all time, today announced plans to showcase the all-new Trion 100 series, a new SSD based on Triple-Level Cell (TLC) NAND flash, at this year's Computex in Taipei, Taiwan held June 2 - 6. As OCZ's new value-oriented option, Trion 100 SSDs are built to provide an easy and affordable way for entry-level users to optimize their mobile or desktop systems.

Leveraging Toshiba's Alishan SSD controller and premium A19 TLC flash memory technology, the Trion 100 series was designed to deliver a superior balance of performance, reliability, and value and will be available this summer. Running live in OCZ's Computex booth, Trion 100's preliminary performance ratings include up to 550MB/s of bandwidth and up to 91,000 random read IOPS, making the Trion 100 series a competitive upgrade solution that will transform any notebook or PC.

"Computex is the ideal venue for us to unveil our upcoming TLC NAND-based Trion 100 SSDs," said Alex Mei, CMO and GM of the Client Business at OCZ Storage Solutions. "By leveraging controller and TLC NAND technology from Toshiba, we are pleased to be able to bring to market the exciting new Trion 100 SSD Series which will offer end-users an optimal mix of performance, features, and value, making it easier than ever for value-conscious consumers to leverage the benefits of a high quality yet affordable SSD that delivers improved desktop and mobile computing experiences."

OCZ Storage Solutions -- a Toshiba Group Company and leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced its Z-Drive 6000 SSD Series that combines PCI Express (PCIe) Gen 3 and Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) technologies with an extensive enterprise feature-set and robust endurance and reliability. The NVMe-compliant Z-Drive 6000 Series is available in multiple configurations supporting a variety of form factors, capacity points, and endurance ratings.

The NVMe specification extends traditional PCIe flash storage to new levels and was architected from the ground up to enable specific benefits of non-volatile memory-based solid-state storage. It features a streamlined memory interface, command set and queue design that delivers faster access to critical data and highly resilient storage capabilities. This enables both system builders and storage vendors alike to develop different parts of a storage ecosystem to a standard specification with broad interoperability support between storage devices, host platforms and software. NVMe is expected to open new opportunities for faster, better and stronger flash-based storage applications while significantly improving PCIe SSD deployments over the next five years.

OCZ Storage Solutions -- a Toshiba Group Company and leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced a new series of SATA III SSDs to add to its Intrepid 3000 enterprise portfolio. The new Intrepid 3700 SSD Series delivers superior performance and I/O latency responses that dramatically improve application performance and I/O efficiencies, and supports higher storage densities up to 2TB representing OCZ's largest capacity enterprise SATA SSDs to date.

"Datacenter customers have asked for larger solid state drives that do not make any sacrifices in performance or endurance to address the need to manage the ever growing amounts of data being generated by today's computing environments," said Daryl Lang, CTO at OCZ Storage Solutions. "Our new Intrepid 3700 Series is designed to meet these market requirements for an easy to deploy solid state solution that delivers the very best balance of features, endurance, and capacity."

OCZ Storage Solutions, a Toshiba Group Company and the most awarded solid state drive (SSD) brand of all time, today announced the release of the next generation Vector 180 SSD series along with the all-new SSD Guru storage management solution. Worthy of flagship status, the new Vector 180 features enhanced reliability, technology, storage capacity, and superior customer support all while providing the Vector's original game-changing performance and endurance it's known for. The feature-rich SSD Guru software tool not only enables users to do routine monitoring and maintenance, but truly helps them unlock their SSD's full potential.

Designed to power today's high-end consumer systems, the Vector 180 series is optimized for hardcore gaming and data-intensive applications thanks to its powerful OCZ Barefoot 3 controller and in-house Toshiba A19nm MLC NAND flash technology. New to this particular Vector release is an advanced reliability protection feature called Power Failure Management Plus (PFM+). In the event of unexpected system power loss or instability, the PFM+ feature helps safeguard the SSD and its at-rest data.

In a bid to stay current, with the advent of M.2, PCI-Express, and NVMe, OCZ announced its newest homebrew SSD controller. Called JetExpress, this controller has the potential to be the industry's fastest, rivaled only by Samsung, and its SM951 drives. The controller features a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 host interface, with 4 GB/s of bandwidth per direction, 8 GB/s in total. The controller supports 8-16 ONFI channels, 1-2 GB of DDR3 DRAM cache, and power loss protection circuits. It supports three popular form-factors, including M.2, 2.5-inch (likely SATA-Express), and SFF-8639. M.2 PCIe prototypes were put up for our lenses. The company plans to make both PC enthusiast and enterprise products using this controller.

OCZ unveiled its flagship 2.5-inch SATA SSD, the Vector 180. Built to offer both performance and high write-endurance, the Vector 180 is based on the company's new Barefoot 3 M00 controller, in its highest performance turning. This controller is wired to Toshiba A19 MLC NAND flash chips, with 50 GB/day write endurance rating.

The Vector 180 comes in capacities of 240 GB, 480 GB, and 960 GB; offering sequential transfer rates of up to 550 MB/s reads, with up to 530 MB/s writes; and up to 100,000 IOPS 4K random reads, with up to 95,000 IOPS 4K random writes. Other features include power failure management, and the company's flexible 5-year ShieldPlus warranty.

OCZ Storage Solutions, a Toshiba Group Company and the most awarded solid state drive (SSD) brand of all time, today announced plans to showcase the highly anticipated JetExpress SSD controller at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada to be held January 6 - 9, 2015.

Designed and developed in-house, JetExpress will be the heart and soul of OCZ's future product line. JetExpress silicon is native SATA and PCIe/NVMe and will support multiple form factors including M.2, 2.5-inch SATA, and SFF-8639 which enables PCI Express speeds in a compact 2.5-inch form factor. The flexible and advanced architecture of JetExpress is designed to offer superior flash endurance empowering SSDs to continue down the path to ubiquity in both mainstream notebooks and hyperscale data centers.

OCZ Storage Solutions -- a Toshiba Group Company and leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced its new enterprise-class Saber 1000 SSD Series designed for read-intensive applications targeting high-volume deployment hyperscale, web-hosting and distributed computing environments. The SATA-based Saber 1000 Series solves demanding key customer business challenges and supported by an enterprise-optimized feature-set, large storage capacities, and low total cost of ownership (TCO).

The new series leverages the latest A19nm NAND flash from Toshiba and is available in 240GB, 480GB and 960GB usable capacities. It utilizes OCZ's internally developed Barefoot 3 controller and firmware which delivers consistent sustained I/O performance across all capacities to accelerate enterprise applications.

OCZ Storage Solutions - a Toshiba Group Company and the most awarded solid state drive (SSD) brand of all time, today announced availability of the new Vertex 460A SATA III SSD series for mainstream users. This line includes all the features and performance specifications of the popular Vertex 460 series, with new enhancements including the use of next generation Toshiba A19 MLC NAND flash, and the Company's innovative ShieldPlus Warranty.

Hitting shelves this week, Vertex 460A SSDs were designed to provide the very best of both worlds for those seeking high-end performance and accessories at a competitive price point. With the proven OCZ Barefoot 3 controller at its core, Vertex 460A provides performance that stands apart from other solutions with focus on real world metrics such as sustained performance and mixed workloads, all designed to provide a faster, more responsive computing experience.