Micron, the US-based manufacturer of various kinds of memory technologies, has today announced some quite interesting products at its Computex 2021 keynote. For starters, the company has announced a new portfolio of products based on 176-layer NAND. There are currently two products listed that use this new technology and those are the Micron 3400 and 2450 M.2 NVMe SSDs. Based on the PCIe 4.0 interface, the 2450 SSD lineup is designed as a value-oriented solution that comes in M.2-2280, M.2-2242, and M.2-2230 sizes. It ranges from 256 GB to 1 TB in capacities, which are supposed to be priced as a value purchase.

In a contrast, the 3400 SSD is M.2-2280 design, meant for only the highest performance. The sequential read speeds go up to 6600 MB/s, while the sequential writes go up to 5000 MB/s (in the case of the 2 TB model). Capacities range from 512 GB to 2 TB and only the 1 TB and 2 TB variants have the 5000 MB/s write speeds, while the 512 GB version is capped at 3600 MB/s speed. Both SSD models are featuring a heat spreader on top of NAND chips and spot an in-house and Micron-developed NVMe 1.4 SSD controller. However, Micron does note that the company is free to use any 3rd party SSD controller as we are deep in component shortages with high demand for SSDs. You can get an in-depth look at the 2450 and 3400 M.2 SSDs from Micron's website.

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today unveiled its new enterprise solid-state drive (SSD) featuring Zoned Namespace (ZNS) technology—the PM1731a. Leveraging ZNS, the SSD will maximize available user capacity and offer an extended lifespan in storage server, data center and cloud environments.

"Samsung's ZNS SSD reflects our commitment to introducing differentiated storage solutions that can substantially enhance the reliability and lifetime of server SSDs," said Sangyeun Cho, senior vice president of the Memory Software Development Team at Samsung Electronics. "We plan to leverage quad-level cell (QLC) NAND technology in our next-generation ZNS drives to enable higher thresholds for storage performance and capacity in the enterprise systems of tomorrow."

Kingston Technology Europe Co LLP, an affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., today announced the name of its new high-performance, enthusiast and gaming brand: Kingston FURY. Building on the incredible success of the HyperX memory products, Kingston has rebranded its DRAM, flash and SSD gaming line into Kingston FURY, investing resources and knowledge from its core business to create the next generation of performance products.

Kingston FURY continues the evolution of leading-edge, high-performance, enthusiast and gaming memory solutions from the largest independent memory manufacturer in the world, backed by three decades of Kingston engineering, testing, manufacturing and customer service expertise. The company's leadership position in the DRAM industry demonstrates it has the passion, commitment and resources to make Kingston FURY the leading high-performance, enthusiast and gaming memory solution in the market.

addlink has just announced three of their upcoming addGame products, which are the X95 M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD, SPIDER 4 and SPIDER X4 DDR4 memory at Computex 2021. addlink showcased the full range of addlink's M.2 NVMe SSD product line and has brought these products to the forefront for attendees to experience virtually.

Building on the success of addGame X70 SSD, addGame now presents high-performance M.2 PCIe 4.0 - X95 SSD, overclocking DDR4 memory - SPIDER 4 and SPIDER X4. All three of the products not only featured high-quality aluminium but also tightly screened ICs that optimized stability and compatibility when dealing with heavy workload or high-definition games.

Sabrent, which has become one of the go-tos in the world of Chia plotting and farming due to the price/performance/endurance ratio of its Rocket NVMe SSDs, has announced a new series of products specifically developed and marketed towards the Chia plotting crowds. Their new Plotripper SSDs (which drink from a quite obvious reference to AMD's Threadripper) have been designed to endure the harsh writing cycles for Chia plotting. Plotting is the process wherein you calculate the cryptographically-generated plots, and which can incur SSDs on a 1.6 TB write workload per 101 GB plot. The finished plot is then usually offloaded to a slow, capacious storage device (such as an external HDD) where it lays, awaiting for network challenges ad-infinitum. At time of writing, the total storage committed to Chia farming is estimated at 14 Exabytes.

The new Plotripper products are available in a mainstream and a "pro" variant. The mainstream Sabrent Plotripper offers a 10,000 TBW for its 2 TB capacity, which is already one of the highest available in consumer drives (until now). The Pro versions, however, promise 27,000 TBW of endurance for its 1 Tb capacity, and a staggering 54,000 TBW endurance rating for the 2 TB one. No word on pricing as of now, but these are sure to become some of the most sought-after SSDs for anyone planning to enter the Chia "farming" scene - and will definitely be priced accordingly.

Leading global motherboard manufacturer, ASRock, is proud to announce its latest X570S & B550 PG Riptide motherboards for AMD Ryzen AM4 desktop processors. "Riptide is named after a specific kind of water current with strong wave that occurs in the ocean. Riptide is unapparent, yet strong, fast and carries a powerful punch; this is the design philosophy of ASRock PG Riptide series motherboards" Said Chris Lee, General Manager of ASRock motherboard & gaming peripherals business unit.

The Riptide is a new crew of Phantom Gaming series, these stylishly PG Riptide series motherboards are armed to the teeth with gear designed to fulfill gamers everyday needs, without biting into the bank account unlike other similarly spec'd, high-end motherboards.

Today at Computex 2021, Intel announced two new additions to the lineup of 11th Gen Intel Core processors. These new processors, combined with Intel's co-engineering work with independent software vendors (ISVs) and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), continue Intel's leadership in mobile compute—delivering the world's best processors for thin-and-light Windows-based laptops. Intel also introduced its first 5G product for the next generation of PC experiences, Intel 5G Solution 5000, following the previously announced collaboration with MediaTek and Fibocom.

"We've taken the world's best processor for thin-and-light Windows laptops and made the experience even better with the addition of our two new 11th Gen Intel Core processors with Intel Iris Xe graphics. In addition, we know real-world performance and connectivity are vital to our partners and the people who rely on PCs every day, so we're continuing that momentum with more platform capabilities and choice in the market with the launch of our first 5G product for PCs: the Intel 5G Solution 5000," said Chris Walker, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of Mobility Client Platforms.

Marvell today announced its new Bravera SC5 controller family, bringing unprecedented performance, best-in-class efficiency, and leading security features to address ever-expanding workloads in the cloud. The massive amount of data to be processed in cloud data centers is driving demand for faster and higher bandwidth storage in these environments. Marvell's Bravera SC5 SSD controllers address the critical requirements for scalable, containerized cloud storage infrastructure. By enabling the highest performing flash storage solutions, Marvell's controllers are poised to be the foundation for data centers that offer ultra-low latency, real-time applications while also providing cost-optimized, cloud-scale capacity.

As the industry's first SSD controllers to support PCIe 5.0 and NVMe 1.4b, Marvell's Bravera SC5 doubles the performance compared to PCIe 4.0 SSDs. This contributes to accelerated workloads and reduced latency, dramatically improving the user experience. In order to meet cloud service providers' stringent security requirements to ensure users' data is safe and protected, the controllers offer FIPS-compliant root of trust (RoT), AES 256-bit encryption and multi-key revocation. The new controllers are the first with a hardware-based Elastic SLA Enforcer to assure quality of service (QoS) and provide metering capabilities per customer to increase overall storage efficiency and utilization while lowering total cost of ownership (TCO).

Western Digital today introduced another addition to their PCIe 4.0 lineup - which previously consisted only on the WD Black 850, their enthusiast-level offering. Now, the Black 850 gets some entry-level company with the Black 750 SE, which makes use of a 4-channel DRAMless controller to keep the drive fed at some still respectable 3600 MB/s, Sequential Write, and 2830 MB/s Sequential Read speeds (WD isn't quoting the random read/write speeds just yet).

The new WD_Black SN750 SE will start at $49.99 for the 250 GB model. Pricing on the 500 GB and 1 TB capacities hasn't been announced at time of writing, nor is there a mention of a 2 TB model being a part of the current lineup plans. The WD_Black SN750 SE is available for preorder from WD now, and will land on store shelves this summer.

Total NAND Flash revenue for 1Q21 increased by 5.1% QoQ to US$14.82 billion, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. In particular, bit shipments rose by 11% QoQ, while the overall ASP dropped by 5% QoQ; hence, bit shipment growth offset the decline in the overall ASP. Although NAND Flash demand from notebook computer and smartphone manufacturers remained high, clients from the data center segment exhibited relatively weak demand, since this segment had yet to leave the state of NAND Flash oversupply. Contract prices for this quarter therefore still mostly showed a considerable QoQ drop. On the other hand, OEMs/ODMs of end products began to increase procurement of NAND Flash products from the second half of January onward because they noticed that the shortage of NAND Flash controller ICs was affecting the production of medium- and low-density storage products. Besides avoiding a possible supply crunch in the future, OEMs/ODMs were placing additional orders because they were preparing for a push to expand market share. On account of these developments, the overall NAND Flash demand surpassed expectations in 1Q21.

GIGABYTE Technology, one of the top global manufacturers of motherboards, graphics cards, and hardware solutions, announces today the latest AORUS Gen4 7000s Prem. SSD with up to 7 GB/s read speed while optimizing passive thermal dissipation, which promises no throttling under long-lasting operation. Through the SSD Tool Box application, users can have an instant control on overall operation of SSD.

AORUS Gen4 7000s Prem. SSD adopts the PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 interface and it equips the latest Phison E18 selected 8-channel controller, which provides users with ultimate random access rate, as well as the high speed 3D-TLC NAND Flash and SLC cache design that brings the PCIe 4.0 into full play. With the read speed up to 7 GB/s and write speed up to 6.85 GB/s, AORUS Gen4 7000s Prem. SSD can power up content creators, gamers, and users eager for extreme performance.

Phison Electronics Corp., a global leader in NAND flash controllers and a complete line of storage solutions, and Cigent Technology, Inc., the leader in embedded cybersecurity technology, today unveiled design details behind the partnership that has delivered the industry's first and only line of self-defending storage devices with cybersecurity built into the firmware itself to protect against ransomware, data theft and malicious insider theft.

Phison's innovative and robust NAND flash solutions support a broad range of applications including embedded, consumer, enterprise and automotive. The Phison Crypto-SSD is a line of TCG enabled Self-Encrypting Drives that are designed to pass FIPS 140-3 Level 2 certification. Phison is committed to data security which helps to protect business and government users against loss or theft. Phison's collaboration with Cigent expands the E12DC Crypto-SSD security architecture to add additional compute capabilities, attack detectors and sensors directly on the drive. Together with Cigent, Phison has created a product that raises the bar of data security to a whole new level.

With the growing prevalence of crypto currencies and the mining of them, having the right hardware has never been more important. In recent months, the Chia crypto currency has seen a surge in popularity. Unlike other crypto currencies, Chia is based on a proof of space time model rather than proof of work model used by other currencies. In terms of hardware, this mean Chia places more importance on storage rather than performance.

Given its leading position and expertise in high-capacity storage products, ADATA SSDs have been the go-to hardware for many Chia miners the world over. In April of 2021, ADATA saw a five-fold month-over-month increase in its SSD and DRAM orders. What's more, in multiple articles written about the recent Chia trend, many media outlets have cited ADATA SSDs as ideal solutions for Chia mining. The popularity of Chia and its resulting demand for high-capacity SSDs looks to continue.

The world's leading memory brand, TEAMGOUP, has spared no effort in researching the latest technology in computer hardware storage. In Q1 of this year, we not only demonstrated our outstanding ability to lead the industry in DDR5 memory generation, but today we also announce a major technological breakthrough in storage products, including a UFD flash drive with read/write speed almost comparable to SATA III SSD, and the T-FORCE USB 3.2 external SSD with 8 TB capacity and a read/write sped of 2000 MB/s.

The most common USB flash drives in the past used the USB 2.0 specification, and the read/write speed is about 25/10 MB/s. TEAMGROUP's USB drive has the latest technology and adopts USB 3.2 Gen2 high-speed interface, and the actual transfer speed can reach about 600/500 MB/s, which is almost equal to the performance level of SATA III SSD, and the capacity is topped to 1 TB. TEAMGOUP will accompany consumers to the new generation with our strength in technology. With TEAMGROUP's compact USB drive, you can have the same performance as an external SSD that is the size of a sliced toast.

Kioxia Corporation, the world leader in memory solutions, today announced a 20 billion yen investment to expand its Technology Development Building at its Yokohama Technology Campus and to establish its new Shin-Koyasu Advanced Research Center. The new facilities are expected to be operational by 2023 and will strengthen Kioxia's research and technology development by bringing together its R&D sites in Kanagawa Prefecture to improve efficiency and to create a more conducive working environment for innovation through collaboration.

At the Yokohama Technology Campus, the expanded Technology Development Building will nearly double the space of the current facility, allowing Kioxia to expand its product evaluation capabilities that will, in turn, increase its product quality. The expanded facility will also provide space for an increased workforce to strengthen product development in the future. The new building will also feature an environmentally friendly design with highly efficient energy-saving equipment.

Memblaze today announced its first PCIe4.0 NVMe SSDs PBlaze6 6920 Series, which represent its 6th-generation enterprise SSD products. This Series is developed based on Memblaze's self-developed MUFP (Memblaze Unified Framework Platform), a unified framework platform for the development of all subsequent products of the firm.

The MUFP enables flexible decoupling among modules, improves the reusability and flexibility of firmware, and strengthens the cross-platform capability of firmware algorithm through software layering. The solutions based on Memblaze's MUFP are compatible with different controllers and NAND flash memory, thereby significantly improving the R&D efficiency of enterprise SSDs, shortening product development cycle and time to market, and meeting fast-changing market demands.

Chia, the new crypto-currency that relies on storage as proof-of-work to obtain, rather than processing power, is already causing widespread failures of storage devices that have a finite write endurance, according a report by Chinese tech publication MyDrivers. We've detailed how Chia farming works in an older article. Farming it (i.e. participating in the network that keeps the crypto-currency running, in exchange for the currency itself), takes a toll on your storage device. NAND flash-based devices, such as SSDs and USB flash drives, can be re-written a finite number of times, described by manufacturers as "write endurance" and expressed as TBW (terabytes written), or DWPD (drive writes per day, a unit in which drive size is accounted for).

MyDrivers notes that Chia farmers in China are noticing that typical 256 GB SSDs barely last through 40 drive-write days, 80 days for 512 GB, and about 160 days for 1 TB. Endurance varies among the various SSD brands, and NAND flash type used. Since disk space, and not drive performance is paramount in farming Chia, and magnetic storage devices such as HDDs offer more re-writing, stocks of high-capacity HDDs, including those typically headed to the NVR and security surveilance markets, are being soaked up by Chia farmers.

Singapore cybersecurity firm Flexxon on Monday launched the world's first solid-state drive (SSD) embedded with artificial intelligence (AI) data security. As the "last line of defence" to protect data at the hardware level, the SSD is able to guard against both remote and physical attacks, boasting a range of features including temperature sensors to detect unusual movements that occur. In the event of such an incursion, the device - also known as X-PHY - will alert the user via email and lock itself to prevent any physical tampering. Users may then unlock the device via a dynamic authentication process. For clients with high security needs, such as the military, data may be automatically wiped should the device fall into the wrong hands.

Minister for Foreign Affairs and Minister-in-charge of Singapore's Smart Nation Initiative Vivian Balakrishnan said that the innovation was a "breakthrough" and a significant step in increasing security and safety for end users, having put AI into the firmware layer of an SSD. Congratulating Flexxon on its new product, Dr Balakrishnan - who was the guest-of-honour at the launch - also called on similar companies to include research institutes, universities and the private sector to enhance local research and development efforts in AI.

In the initial days of SSDs, some 11-odd years ago, SSDs were considered unreliable. They'd randomly fail on you, causing irrecoverable data loss. Gaming desktop users usually installed an HDD to go with the SSD in their builds, so they could take regular whole-disk images of the SSD onto the HDD; Microsoft even added a disk imaging feature with Windows 7. Since then, SSDs have come a long way with reliability, are now backed with longer warranties than HDDs, and high endurance. Notebook vendors are increasingly opting for SSDs as the sole storage device in their thin-and-light products. A Backblaze study reveals an interesting finding: SSDs are 21 times more reliable than HDDs.

Backblaze is popular for conducting regular actionable studies on storage device reliability in the enterprise segment, particularly dissecting how each brand of HDD and SSD fares in terms of drive failures or average failure rates (AFR). In a study covering Q1 2021 (January 1 to March 31), Backblaze finds that the AFR of HDDs across brands, stands at 10.56%. In the same period, SSDs across brands lodged an AFR of a stunning 0.58%. In other words, roughly 1 in 10 HDDs failed, compared to roughly 1 in 200 SSDs. Things get interesting when Backblaze looks all the way back to 2013, when it started studying drive reliability.

Seagate Technology today announced the new Seagate One Touch SSD offering NVMe-competitive performance and stylish portability for technology enthusiasts and content creators alike. One Touch SSD delivers maximum sequential read/write speeds (up to 1030 MB/s) and up to 2 TB of storage making it a high-performance external drive optimized for efficiency when managing and transporting important files.

Compatible with Windows and Mac, the drive offers USB compatibility out of the box (exFAT formatted). Seagate's One Touch SSD uses USB 3.2 Gen 2 USB-C technology and is compatible with USB-C and USB 3.0 computers; both cables are included in the box. Also compatible with Android mobile devices, One Touch SSD helps free up extra space by backing up videos, photos, and files using the Seagate Mobile Touch app. Great for those on the go, the drive offers shock-resistance to a drop height of up to 2 meters.

Silicon Motion Technology Corporation today announced its financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2021. For the first quarter, net sales (GAAP) increased sequentially to $182.4 million from $143.9 million in fourth quarter 2020. Net income (GAAP) increased to $34.4 million or $0.98 per diluted ADS (GAAP) from net income (GAAP) of $1.4 million or $0.04 per diluted ADS (GAAP) in fourth quarter 2020. For the first quarter, net income (non-GAAP) increased to $38.7 million or $1.11 per diluted ADS (non-GAAP) from a net income (non-GAAP) of $29.9 million or $0.86 per diluted ADS (non-GAAP) in fourth quarter 2020.

"As we had previously communicated, we are seeing very strong demand for our SSD and eMMC+UFS controllers," said Wallace Kou, President and CEO of Silicon Motion. "Customer demand was well in excess of our ability to supply as both our foundry supply and inventory on hand are limited."

Xilinx, Inc. (Nasdaq: XLNX), the leader in adaptive computing, today announced record revenues of $851 million for the fiscal fourth quarter, up 6% over the previous quarter and an increase of 13% year over year. Fiscal 2021 revenues were $3.15 billion, largely flat from the prior fiscal year. GAAP net income for the fiscal fourth quarter was $188 million, or $0.75 per diluted share. Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $204 million, or $0.82 per diluted share. GAAP net income for fiscal year 2021 was $647 million, or $2.62 per diluted share. Non-GAAP net income for fiscal year 2021 was $762 million, or $3.08 per diluted share.

Additional fourth quarter of fiscal year 2021 comparisons are provided in the charts below. "We are pleased with our fourth quarter results as we delivered record revenues and double-digit year-over-year growth in the midst of a challenging supply chain environment," said Victor Peng, Xilinx president and CEO. "Xilinx saw further improvement in demand across a majority of our diversified end markets with key strength in our Wireless, Data Center and Automotive markets, the pillars of our growth strategy. Our teams have executed well and we remain focused on continuing to meet customers' critical needs.

Sabrent first teased their upcoming RocketQ Battleship SSD offering 8x 8 TB RocketQ M.2 NVMe SSDs paired with the Highpoint SSD7540 8-port PCIe 4.0 x16 NVMe RAID controller in January. This combination offers 64 TB of NVMe storage with speeds of up to 28 GB/s, the product appears to be nearing release after HighPoint listed the SSD on their website. The RocketQ Battleship has been listed on HighPoint Technologies NVMe AIC Drive Solutions page as coming soon. The RocketQ Battleship won't come cheap with the individual 8 TB RocketQ drives costing 1299 USD each, we would expect the product to retail for north of 10,000 USD if it ever gets a public release.

HighPoint TechnologiesBuilt around Sabrent's diverse Rocket Series of NVMe SSD's, Elite Class AIC drives offer unprecedented storage capacity and class-leading versatility

In recent years, the cryptocurrency market has been gaining a great deal of attention, leading to a continuous surge in global mining. Chia, started trading in May, is one of the new types of cryptocurrencies. Its mining method is different from previous cryptocurrencies that use GPUs and ASICs to complete calculations and earn profits. The everlastingly durability EXPERT PCIe SSD, developed by TEAMGROUP's creator sub-brand T-CREATE, is the best choice for the environmentally-friendly "storage capacity mining" that Chia promotes.

The Chia Network utilizes a consensus algorithm called "Proof of Space and Time." A Chia farmer's possible yield is directly proportional to their amount of storage space. If you want to earn higher profits today, you need to have more hard drive space. This approach ensures that no one will design special-purpose hardware (ASIC) for mining it. Storage capacity and power consumption are also relatively unrelated. Therefore, Chia Network is a new "green" currency system. If you want to join the mining community utilizing this environmentally-friendly model, T-CREATE EXPERT PCIe SSD can help you get the greatest results. It features spectacular TBW values of up 12,000 TB, making it the perfect tool for supporting the intense write-cycle algorithms required for the mining process.

GIGABYTE today unveiled the M30 line of solid state drives built in the M.2-2280 form-factor, which leverage PCI-Express 3.0 x4 host interface. The drives combine an unknown controller with 256 MB of DDR3L DRAM cache, and 3D TLC NAND flash memory; and comes in capacities of 512 GB and 1 TB. Both these capacity variants have the same amount of DRAM cache. GIGABYTE is using a high-density PCB with 2 oz copper layers, which it claims, can lower controller temperature by up to 15 °C and NAND flash temperature by up to 5 °C.

As for performance, GIGABYTE claims that both capacity variants offer sequential reads of up to 3500 MB/s, and sequential writes of up to 3000 MB/s. The 1 TB variant offers 4K random reads of up to 308,000 IOPS, and random writes of up to 332,000 IOPS; while the 512 GB variant is slightly faster, offering up to 350,000 IOPS 4K random reads, and 302,000 IOPS 4K random writes. The drives are backed by 5-year warranty, the 1 TB variant offers an endurance of 650 TBW, and the 512 GB variant 350 TBW. The company didn't reveal pricing.