Greenliant has secured major design wins with its EnduroSLC solid state drives (SSDs) in a wide range of demanding, extreme environment applications for customers that need best-in-class reliability and product longevity. Greenliant's proprietary EnduroSLC Technology substantially enhances data retention and extends the write endurance of 1-bit-per-cell SSDs with advanced hardware ECC capabilities and NAND flash management algorithms. EnduroSLC SSDs not only offer superior data retention capabilities under complex temperature conditions, but also support 50K, 100K and industry-leading, ultra high 250K+ program-erase (P/E) cycles, which are at least a 5x improvement over pseudo-SLC (pSLC) SSDs and a 50x improvement over MLC NAND-based products.

For systems that are in remote locations and costly to maintain-from satellite to subsea communications-customers recognize the value of EnduroSLC SSDs; they can reliably operate and retain data for long periods of time in harsh conditions. Long-life, write-intensive products, such as transportation black box recorders and industrial data loggers, have also benefitted from the enhanced features of EnduroSLC SSDs. EnduroSLC storage products are designed with Greenliant's advanced SATA, NVMe PCIe and eMMC controllers, operate at industrial temperatures (-40 to +85 degrees Celsius) and are backed by the company's Long-Term Availability program (http://bit.ly/SSD-LTA-program), providing an extra level of support.

TerraMaster, a professional brand that specializes in providing innovative storage products including network-attached storage (NAS) devices,launches the F4-210 1 GB version, the same 4-bay NAS for personal cloud storage at a more affordable price. The TerraMaster F4-210 is just a portion of the price of an Intel-based NAS device. The F4-210 supports up to 108 TB of storage and supports 3.5" SATA hard drives and 2.5" SATA hard drives and solid-state drives.

The TerraMaster F4-210 is perfect for users that are looking for a powerful personal cloud storage solution without a hefty investment. Costing just half the price of an equivalent Intel x86 quad-core processor-based NAS storage, the F4-210 can deliver modest read/write speeds of up to 124 MB/s with two WD Red 4 TB hard drives in RAID 0. The F4-210 supports various private cloud services including Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive.

Microsoft is introducing some new requirements for external storage devices on the Xbox Series X/S. The new consoles feature high-speed PCIe 4.0 SSD storage which should greatly reduce loading times, with 802 GB of usable space on the Xbox Series X for games and apps. This internal SSD will allow gamers to install a handful of AAA games, for those looking to expand the storage on the new console have two options the proprietary high-speed connector or a USB based storage device.

The high-speed connector will allow for plug and play storage upgrades with high speed NVMe SSDs from Seagate however, these expansion modules will come in at a high price. For those looking to save some money, Microsoft has recently confirmed the minimum requirements for using an external storage device for game and app installations, which are USB 3.0 only and a minimum of 128 GB. This will rule out older HDDs and lower capacity USB sticks but will helpfully allow for a higher quality experience.

Western Digital Corp. is helping gamers enhance their setups and adapt to the evolving gaming landscape heralded by the next generation of games with today's introduction of three new and upcoming products for its WD_BLACK portfolio of storage solutions. These include its first NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) with next-gen PCIe Gen 4 technology, a fully bootable Gen3 x8 add-in-card and a Thunderbolt 3-powered NVMe SSD gaming dock, each offering eye-catching RGB lighting options.

"As game developers move towards creating immersive titles that require higher performance, consumers need to equip themselves with the best tools to stay up-to-speed," said Jim Welsh, senior vice president, Consumer Solutions, Western Digital. "Innovative, high-performance storage solutions are essential to keep up with this ever-changing landscape. Our latest WD_BLACK products have been purpose-built to allow gamers to meet the increasingly high standards of future games and gaming platforms. We've optimized these products to not only provide more storage for gamers but to elevate the gaming experience as a whole."

The Xbox Series X & S consoles are now available to pre-order and come with 1 TB and 512 GB custom NVMe storage drives respectively. The two consoles both feature a custom port for an Xbox Storage card which features the same custom NVMe technology used in the internal drives. The consoles can still be expanded via an external USB storage device but will be limited by the bandwidth of USB 3.2.

The Xbox Series S will only support digital games and with the rise of Xbox Game Pass and ever-increasing game sizes the internal drive will quickly be exhausted. The price for a 1 TB expansion module will be £159 (~ 200 USD) which is fair considering the speeds offered by the drive and the mandatory Microsoft tax. The expansion modules do represent a considerate cost in comparison to the consoles with the 1 TB expansion module costing over 60% of the MSRP for an Xbox Series S.

There is expected to be more than 79 zettabytes of IoT data in 2025, but the real value of this data is found in the insights it generates. The closer to the data source we can produce these insights the better, because of the improved security, latency and energy efficiency enabled. Computational storage is emerging as a critical piece of the data storage puzzle because it puts processing power directly on the storage device, giving companies secure, quick and easy access to vital information.

Our expertise and legacy in storage puts Arm in a strong position to address the changing needs of this market - with around 85% of hard disk drive controllers and solid-state drive controllers based on Arm, we are already a trusted partner for billions of storage devices. Today, we're announcing Arm Cortex-R82, our first 64-bit, Linux-capable Cortex-R processor designed to accelerate the development and deployment of next-generation enterprise and computational storage solutions.

NVIDIA at its GeForce "Ampere" launch event announced the RTX IO technology. Storage is the weakest link in a modern computer, from a performance standpoint, and SSDs have had a transformational impact. With modern SSDs leveraging PCIe, consumer storage speeds are now bound to grow with each new PCIe generation doubling per-lane IO bandwidth. PCI-Express Gen 4 enables 64 Gbps bandwidth per direction on M.2 NVMe SSDs, AMD has already implemented it across its Ryzen desktop platform, Intel has it on its latest mobile platforms, and is expected to bring it to its desktop platform with "Rocket Lake." While more storage bandwidth is always welcome, the storage processing stack (the task of processing ones and zeroes to the physical layer), is still handled by the CPU. With rise in storage bandwidth, the IO load on the CPU rises proportionally, to a point where it can begin to impact performance. Microsoft sought to address this emerging challenge with the DirectStorage API, but NVIDIA wants to build on this.

According to tests by NVIDIA, reading uncompressed data from an SSD at 7 GB/s (typical max sequential read speeds of client-segment PCIe Gen 4 M.2 NVMe SSDs), requires the full utilization of two CPU cores. The OS typically spreads this workload across all available CPU cores/threads on a modern multi-core CPU. Things change dramatically when compressed data (such as game resources) are being read, in a gaming scenario, with a high number of IO requests. Modern AAA games have hundreds of thousands of individual resources crammed into compressed resource-pack files.

Nimbus Data, a leading innovator in flash memory storage, today unveiled ExaDrive NL, the world's highest capacity QLC flash SSD and the industry's first QLC flash SAS SSD for enterprise workloads. With industry-leading capacity up to 64 TB in a single SSD, ExaDrive NL helps organizations eliminate server sprawl, reduce software licensing costs, improve efficiency, and reduce data center operating costs by up to 75%.

"Customers are always looking for more capacity and more efficient ways to access their data," said Jeff Janukowicz, Research Vice President, IDC. "High capacity QLC flash SSDs, like Nimbus Data's ExaDrive NL, help organizations migrate to enterprise-grade flash storage as cost-effectively as possible, while simplifying hybrid storage that blends HDDs and SSDs seamlessly to optimize cost and performance for their workloads."

Fujifilm, a Japanese company focused on photography, imaging, printing, and biotechnology, predicts that it can build a 400 terabyte cartridge using Strontium Ferrite (SrFe) technology. Thanks to a report by Blocks&Files, who was press-briefed by Fujifilm, we have some information on the future of tape storage. Tape storage uses Linear Tape-Open (LTO) technology, which is an open standard developed by IBM to ensure all tape-based storage devices use the same format, instead of proprietary magnetic formats. We are currently at the LTO-8 version of this technology, which was released in 2017. Currently, LTO-8 can hold 12 TB in a single cartridge.

Fujifilm, one of the remaining makers of tape storage, predicts that it can pack 400 TB of tape storage in the LTO-13 era. Starting from LTO-12, Fujifilm plans to deploy Strontium Ferrite (SrFe) technology, which is different from the current Barium Ferrite (BaFe). The problem with BaFe is that each new LTO generation uses smaller and smaller particles and that leads to some problems where a tape bit value can't be read, and magnetic polarities would be disturbed if particles get too small. 400 TB tape drives using LTO-13 should be in circulation around 2032/33 according to a Blocks&Files prediction. Below you can check out the table provided by Blocks&Files that shows LTO generations and their abilities.

CHIEFTEC, a world-wide renowned brand for reliable PC chassis and power supplies, today announced the launch of three new accessories products: One M.2 NVMe External SSD Enclosure and two USB-C Docking Stations. Firstly, the CEB-M2C joins the external enclosure product category, supporting the installation of M.2 SSD's with NVMe interface and connecting to the host device via USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C connector, enabling up to 10 Gbit/s transfer speeds.

Additionally, Chieftec is expanding the product range by introducing two USB-C Docking stations to provide Notebook-PC users additional functionality and flexibility. Both docking stations come with Power Delivery 3.0 transferring up to 60 W and a host connection via USB-C 3.1 Gen1. We would highly appreciate if you would be happy to share this news with your readers and viewers. The press kit includes datasheets, images and press release announcement for you to download.

As of March 31, 2020, Backblaze had 132,339 spinning hard drives in our cloud storage ecosystem spread across four data centers. Of that number, there were 2,380 boot drives and 129,959 data drives. This review looks at the Q1 2020 and lifetime hard drive failure rates of the data drive models currently in operation in our data centers and provides a handful of insights and observations along the way. In addition, near the end of the post, we review a few 2019 predictions we posed a year ago. As always, we look forward to your comments.
Hard Drive Failure Stats for Q1 2020

At the end of Q1 2020, Backblaze was using 129,959 hard drives to store customer data. For our evaluation we remove from consideration those drives that were used for testing purposes and those drive models for which we did not have at least 60 drives (see why below). This leaves us with 129,764 hard drives. The table below covers what happened in Q1 2020.

Micron Technology, today announced the first open-source, heterogeneous-memory storage engine (HSE), designed specifically for solid-state drives (SSDs) and storage-class memory (SCM). Legacy storage engines born in the era of hard disk drives (HDDs) failed to architecturally provide for the increased performance and reduced latency of next-generation nonvolatile media. HSE, originally developed by Micron and now available to the open-source community, is ideal for developers using all-flash infrastructure who require the benefits of open-source software, including the ability to customize or enhance code for their unique use cases.

"As the only company developing storage class memory, flash and DRAM technologies, Micron is uniquely positioned to build a software stack that accelerates applications running in today's flash-based storage environments as well as storage class memory-based infrastructure of the future," said Derek Dicker, corporate vice president and general manager of the Storage Business Unit at Micron. "We have delivered a first-of-its-kind innovation for open-source storage developers, unlocking the full potential of high-performance storage applications."

QNAP Systems, Inc. today launched two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C JBOD enclosure models, the 8-bay desktop model TL-D800C and the 12-bay rackmount with redundant power model - TL-R1200C-RP for NAS, PCs, and servers. The multipurpose TL USB JBOD can be used for expanding a QNAP NAS storage space and also serve as storage for PCs and NAS. The TL USB JBOD offers convenient cross-platform file sharing and high flexibility for users, acting as a high-efficiency and intuitive storage expansion option.

QNAP NAS users can use the TL-D800C and TL-R1200C-RP with their NAS, including setting RAID parameters and creating a storage pool using the Storage and Snapshots app in QTS. Alternatively, the TL-D800C and TL-R1200C-RP can be used as a NAS external storage device. Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu users can use QNAP JBOD Manager desktop utility to quickly obtain and view information about the JBOD status, health, fan rotation speed, and check for firmware version updates.

OWC a leading zero emissions Mac and PC technology company and one of the world's most respected providers of hard drives, SSDs, Mac & PC docking solutions and performance upgrade kits, today announced the latest edition of its legendary Mercury Elite Pro external storage system for Mac, PC, Linux machines, Smart TVs, and PS4 and Xbox consoles. The 3.5-inch USB 3.2 5 Gb/s hard drive system is a modern day workhorse, delivering real-world performance up to 283 MB/s and capacities up to 16 TB to keep pace with the demands of everything from video editing projects, critical business data, and irreplaceable personal content to expanding PS4/Xbox One game storage and enjoying music/video content via a Smart TV.

The Essential External Storage Solution for Everyone
The Mercury Elite Pro kicked off OWC's rich, storied history of storage solution innovations nearly 20 years ago, and it has successfully stood the test of time by continuing to offer an incomparable blend of performance, quality, and value in a single HDD storage solution.

JEDEC Solid State Technology Association, the global leader in the development of standards for the microelectronics industry, today announced the publication of Universal Flash Storage (UFS) version 3.1, JESD220E. In addition, an optional new companion standard, JESD220-3: UFS Host Performance Booster (HPB) Extension, has also been published. Developed for mobile applications and computing systems requiring high performance with low power consumption, UFS 3.1 introduces new features intended to help maximize device performance while minimizing power usage. Both JESD220E and JESD220-3 are available for download from the JEDEC website.

Western Digital unveiled a full fledged lineup of WD_BLACK series gaming storage devices. With it, the company is branching out WD_BLACK as its new brand targeted at the gaming crowd, both PC and console. The WD_BLACK brand is a divergence from the company's classic Western Digital Caviar Black line of premium internal hard drives. The brand had a rebirth of sorts with the WD_BLACK SN750 M.2 NVMe SSDs. Its designers are launching several new products, including the WD_BLACK P10 portable hard drive, the WD_BLACK D10 external desktop hard drive, the WD_BLACK P50 portable SSD, and Xbox One variants of the P10 and D10.

The WD_BLACK P10 is a pocket-size portable hard drive with a single USB 3.1 cable needed for both power and connectivity. It comes in 2 TB, 4 TB, and 5 TB capacities. Its Xbox One variant has the Xbox One decal on its body, and includes a 2-month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription. The WD_BLACK D10 is meant to sit on your desk with its separate power and host-connectivity cables. It also puts out USB type-A high current ports to recharge your wireless gaming peripherals. The base variant of the WD_BLACK D10 comes in 8 TB capacity, while the D10 Xbox One edition comes with 12 TB capacity and a 3-month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Lastly, there's the WD_BLACK P50. This portable SSD encloses an NVMe drive that serves up sequential transfer rates of up to 2000 MB/s by utilizing USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbps) interface. A single cable handles power and host connectivity. It comes in capacities of 500 GB, 1 TB, and 2 TB.

As the first and only company shipping PCIe Gen4x4 NVMe SSD solutions, Phison Electronics is the industry leader in enabling high-performance computing for bandwidth-hungry applications. In developing these solutions, Phison is ushering in a new era for applications expected to meet the demand for increasingly faster and higher-definition digital experiences.

The PCIe 4.0 standard offers double the data transfer rate over the prior PCIe 3.0 version. The increased data transfer rate, signal reliability and integrity of PCIe Gen4 enables technology solutions providers with the ability to deliver greater performance, additional flexibility and lower latency to a multitude of applications, including PC, gaming, mobile, storage and networking.

Kingston Digital, Inc., the Flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., a world leader in memory products and technology solutions, today announced KC2000, its next generation M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD for enterprise and power users. Kingston's KC2000 NVMe PCIe SSD delivers powerful performance using the latest Gen 3.0 x 4 controller and 96-layer 3D TLC NAND. Offering superior read and write speeds up to 3,200 and 2,200MB/s, respectively, KC2000 delivers outstanding performance and endurance, and improves workflow in desktop, workstations and high-performance computing (HPC) systems.

KC2000 is a self-encrypting drive that supports end-to-end data protection using 256-bit AES Hardware-based encryption and allows the usage of independent software vendors with TCG Opal 2.0 security management solutions such as Symantec , McAfee , WinMagic and others. KC2000 also has built-in Microsoft eDrive support, a security storage specification for use with BitLocker.

As of March 31, 2019, Backblaze had 106,238 spinning hard drives in our cloud storage ecosystem spread across three data centers. Of that number, there were 1,913 boot drives and 104,325 data drives. This review looks at the Q1 2019 and lifetime hard drive failure rates of the data drive models currently in operation in our data centers and provides a handful of insights and observations along the way.

Hard Drive Failure Stats for Q1 2019
At the end of Q1 2019, Backblaze was using 104,325 hard drives to store data. For our evaluation we remove from consideration those drives that were used for testing purposes and those drive models for which we did not have at least 45 drives (see why below). This leaves us with 104,130 hard drives. The table below covers what happened in Q1 2019.

QNAP Systems, Inc. (QNAP) today launched the TR-002, a 2-bay hardware RAID expansion enclosure that can be utilized as a NAS storage expansion solution, and also as hardware RAID storage for Windows/macOS/Linux computers and NAS. The TR-002 connects to a PC/NAS via USB 3.1 Gen.2 Type-C and provides a dependable storage solution for various user requirements.

The TR-002 supports individual, JBOD and RAID 0/1 storage configurations. QNAP NAS users can use the TR-002 with their NAS to set RAID parameters and create a storage pool by using the "Storage and Snapshots" app within QTS. Alternatively, the TR-002 can be used as an external storage device for the NAS. Windows, macOS and Linux users with limited storage upgrade options can also use the TR-002 as an expansion unit, and a dedicated QNAP External RAID Manager utility (for Windows and macOS) can help them view disk health, change RAID configurations, check logs, and update the firmware of the TR-002.

DNA, the most prominent genetic material, was successfully used as an end-to-end digital data storage medium. Nature reports that a team of biotechnologists led by Christopher N. Takahashi, Bichlien H. Nguyen, Karin Strauss & Luis Ceze with the University of Washington at Seattle, sponsored by DARPA and Microsoft, have succeeded in encoding and decoding digital information into DNA strands. With it, the team has developed an end-to-end DNA-based data storage device, which consists of an encoder that writes ones and zeroes into DNA sequences that are written into oligonucleotides; a liquid physical storage media in which the DNA is literally stored free from contamination and thermal hazards; and a decoder that consists of a nanopore sequencer.

The researchers have developed a protocol on how to convert 1s and 0s to A-G, C-T base-pairs, including error-correction. A 5-byte message "HELLO" was successfully encoded, stored, and decoded without data loss over a period of 21 hours. DNA-based storage unlocks innumerable possibilities. For starters, in the future, humans will be able to grow storage devices, store foreign information within their genome, and transmit digital information through plasmid agents such as purpose-built viruses. 007 writers must be rubbing their hands.

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has begun mass producing the industry's first one-terabyte (TB) embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS) 2.1, for use in next-generation mobile applications. Just four years after introducing the first UFS solution, the 128-gigabyte (GB) eUFS, Samsung has passed the much-anticipated terabyte threshold in smartphone storage. Smartphone enthusiasts will soon be able to enjoy storage capacity comparable to a premium notebook PC, without having to pair their phones with additional memory cards.

"The 1 TB eUFS is expected to play a critical role in bringing a more notebook-like user experience to the next generation of mobile devices," said Cheol Choi, executive vice president of Memory Sales & Marketing at Samsung Electronics. "What's more, Samsung is committed to assuring the most reliable supply chain and adequate production quantities to support the timely launches of upcoming flagship smartphones in accelerating growth of the global mobile market."

Mushkin has been focusing most of its product offerings on the storage area, with multiple product tiers in the SSD space. At CEs 2019, the company put together a booth where it showcased some of its more recent advancements in this product category.

The Pilot-E is an internal NVMe SSD available in 250 GB to 2 TB capacities, with an astonishing up to 3.4 GB/s read and 2.5 GB/s write speeds, powered by an SMI SM226EN controller and 3D TLC NAND. Another lower-tier interpretation of the Pilot-E is the Pilot, which ranges from 120 GB - 2 TB, but uses a slower Silicon Motion SM2262 controller which brings the performance numbers down to 3.2 GB/s and 1.9 GB/s in sequential read and write, respectively.

Seagate Technology plc., a world leader in data solutions, today announced an exciting extension of its portfolio with several new models, including new solid state drive offerings at CES 2019. From gung-ho gamers to Instagram gurus, photo-collecting parents, or visionary creatives, Seagate offers the data storage solutions that empower users to live their best digital lives in today's fast-changing data-heavy landscape.

Today, consumers have more ways than ever to consume content, driving the need to create, distribute and manage data efficiently. According to a recent IDC whitepaper sponsored by Seagate, five billion consumers are currently interacting with data every single day. By 2025, that number will jump to six billion, or 75 percent of the world's population. Each of those six billion people will have at least one data interaction every 18 seconds, bumping the amount of data created worldwide to 175 zettabytes by 2025. Consumers increasingly need reliable ways to collect, protect, manage and access a good portion of that data, and Seagate's latest products - including the cutting-edge LaCie Mobile Drive, LaCie Mobile SSD, Seagate Backup Plus HDDs, FireCuda 510 and BarraCuda 510 internal SSDs, and IronWolf 110 NAS SSD - are designed to fit a variety of data storage needs and digital lifestyles.

NVM Express, Inc. today announced the pending availability of the NVMe Management Interface (NVMe-MI ) specification. The NVMe-MI 1.1 release standardizes NVMe enclosure management, provides the ability to access NVMe-MI functionality in-band and delivers new management features for multiple NVMe subsystem solid-state drive (SSD) deployments.

NVM Express Inc., offering an open collection of NVM Express (NVMe ) specifications and resources on the benefits of non-volatile memory, completed technical work on NVMe-MI 1.1 and the specification is in the ratification process with wide availability anticipated in 60 days. The new management features offer NVMe end-users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) more control and flexibility.

"The NVMe-MI 1.1 specification defines essential management elements requested by the growing NVMe ecosystem," said Peter Onufryk, NVMe Board Member and NVMe-MI Workgroup Chair. "For example, we didn't have a defined standard to manage NVMe enclosures, and now we have a standard that member companies can map to."