Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502) ("Toshiba" or the "Company") today announced its intention to separate into three standalone companies:

• Infrastructure Service Co., consisting of Toshiba's Energy Systems & Solutions, Infrastructure Systems & Solutions, Building Solutions, Digital Solutions and Battery businesses;
• Device Co., comprising Toshiba's Electronic Devices & Storage Solutions business; and
• Toshiba, holding its shares in Kioxia Holdings Corporation (KHC) and Toshiba Tec Corporation (TOKYO: 6588).

The separation will create two distinctive companies with unique business characteristics leading their respective industries in realizing carbon neutrality and infrastructure resilience (Infrastructure Service Co.), and supporting the evolution of social and IT infrastructure (Device Co.). The separation allows each business to significantly increase its focus and facilitate more agile decision-making and leaner cost structures. As such, both companies will be much better positioned to capitalize on their distinct market positions, priorities and growth drivers to deliver sustainable profitable growth and enhanced shareholder value. At the same time, Toshiba intends to monetize shares in Kioxia while maximizing shareholder value and return the net proceeds in full to shareholders as soon as practible to the extent that doing so does not interfere with the smooth implementation of the intended spin-off.

KIOXIA and Western Digital are in talks to merge, creating a behemoth in the data storage industry. This would be KIOXIA's first big corporate move after being spun off from Toshiba Corporation as its flash memory business. The combination—if it goes through—would essentially see the merger of three distinct brands—KIOXIA, Western Digital, and SanDisk; with KIOXIA and SanDisk bringing together market-leading expertise in flash memory; and Western Digital bringing in "warm" and cold storage solutions, such as hard drives. 5G is expected to create an explosion in data, and the merged trans-Pacific entity could more effectively address it. A deal worth $20 billion could be struck by mid-September, if the merger talks succeed. KIOXIA is declining to comment on the story, as it prepares its IPO that includes shares from Toshiba and Bain Capital. Shares of Western Digital, meanwhile, are trading up.

Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC) today announced that for a second consecutive quarter, the company posted a 30+% Q-Q growth in Nearline HDD unit shipment and capacity shipped. Toshiba's Nearline HDD shipments and exabytes reached 2.79 million and 34.15 representing sequential growth of 32% and 33%, respectively. According to TRENDFOCUS' new report (SDAS: HDD Information Service CQ2 '21 Quarterly Update - Executive Summary August 5, 2021), Toshiba's four-quarter average unit and capacity shipped growth rates for Nearline HDDs led all companies at 35% and 46%, respectively. Additionally, Toshiba was the only company to post growth rates higher than the industry's four-quarter average.

"Demand for HDDs, specifically Nearline HDDs, have been on an upward trend due to strong cloud and OEM demand, while the initial launch of the Chia cryptocurrency fueled new incremental channel requirements. Toshiba's competitive Nearline HDD product line up is lifting the company to new records," stated John Chen, Vice President at TRENDFOCUS, Inc. "Moreover, Toshiba's FC-MAMR (Flux Control - Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology used in its 18 TB (MG-09) Nearline HDD product should provide a robust foundation to build upon for its next-generation products."

Intel has partnered with Sabrent to ship NUC 11 Pro Mini PCs with pre-installed Sabrent Rocket 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSDs, on the NUC11TNKv7. The drives feature Toshiba 96-layer 3D TLC NAND flash, and are capable of up to 5 GB/s sequential reads, and up to 4.4 GB/s sequential writes, taking advantage of the PCI-Express 4.0 x4 host interface. On machines with PCIe Gen 3, the drives can attain up to 3.4 GB/s reads, with up to 2.75 GB/s writes. Lower models of the pre-built NUC 11 Pro feature Transcend TS512GMTS430S M.2 SATA drives.

Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation (Toshiba) announces the 18 TB MG09 Series HDD, Toshiba's first HDD models with energy-assisted magnetic recording. The MG09 Series features Toshiba's third-generation, 9-disk helium-sealed design and Toshiba's innovative Flux Control - Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (FC-MAMR) technology, to advance Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) density to 2 TB per disk, achieving a total capacity of 18 TB.

Sample shipments of 18 TB MG09 Series HDD to customers are expected to start sequentially at the end of March 2021. With 12.5% more capacity than prior 16 TB models, 18 TB MG09 CMR drives are compatible with the widest range of applications and operating systems. The MG09 are adapted to mixed random and sequential read and write workloads in both cloud-scale and traditional data center use cases. The MG09 features 7,200rpm performance, a 550 TB per year workload rating, and a choice of SATA and SAS interfaces—all in a power-efficient helium-sealed industry-standard, 3.5-inch form factor.

Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC) today announces that Toshiba, a committed technology leader, led all HDD companies in year-on-year Nearline HDD average capacity growth in 2020. Toshiba followed up an astounding 55% year-on-year growth in 2019 with an impressive 35% year-on-year growth in 2020 to lead the industry for a second consecutive year, according to TRENDFOCUS, Inc.'s data.

"Toshiba has done an admirable job of leveraging its industry-first 9-disk helium design to introduce competitive Nearline HDD products in a timely fashion. This has been the cornerstone in the company's ability to launch higher capacity Nearline HDD programs," stated John Chen, Vice President at TRENDFOCUS, Inc. "Toshiba's 9-disk helium-sealed HDD platform has enabled the company to achieve the highest five-year Compound Annual Growth Rates for Nearline HDD Units, Exabytes, and Average Capacity shipped through 2020."

Proliferation of digital content being created and replicated has led to an explosive growth of data centers around the world. Demand for storage has fueled HDD Exabyte growth, and for the first time in 2020, HDD Exabyte shipments topped 1ZB¹ across all storage applications, from edge to core. The meteoric climb in capacity shipped is a testament to the HDD industry's ability to deliver the most cost-effective and performance delivering storage medium in the market.

KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.) announced another significant technological contribution to cloud data center infrastructures. Today, the company expanded its broad portfolio of client, enterprise and data center SSDs with the addition of the XD6 Series. KIOXIA's E1.S form factor XD6 SSDs are the first Enterprise and Datacenter SSD Form Factor (EDSFF) E1.S SSDs to address the specific requirements of hyperscale applications, including the performance, power and thermal requirements of the Open Compute Platform (OCP) NVMe Cloud SSD Specification.

Designed to maximize system density, efficiency and simplicity, KIOXIA's EDSFF E1.x SSDs represent the future of flash storage for servers in cloud and hyperscale data centers. As defined by the EDSFF consortium and leveraging the OCP NVMe Cloud SSD Specification, the flexible, efficient, small form factor E1.S replaces the M.2 form factor and delivers greater density, performance, reliability, and thermal management. E1.S is also designed to be hot pluggable for increased serviceability, which is another benefit over M.2.

Toshiba announces the Toshiba MG08-D Series HDDs, designed for a wide variety of business-critical applications, such as email and CRM (Customer Resource Management), data analysis for business intelligence, small-medium business servers, and data-retention and compliance archiving.

Toshiba's 7th generation air mechanical design provides better power efficiency and a lower component count to deliver better total cost of ownership than its earlier generation models. The new series features 4 TB, 6 TB and 8 TB models, in both SATA and SAS interfaces. The new 4 TB1 models are available in 512e, 4Kn and 512n sector models, and the 6 TB and 8 TB models are available in 512e and 4Kn sector models, assuring plug-and-play interoperability for applications using prior 4 TB models.

Plextor late last week unveiled the M8V Plus line of mainstream SATA SSDs in the 2.5-inch and M.2-2280 form-factors. The M8V Plus is an incremental update of the original M8V series from 2018. What's new is the implementation of KIOXIA-sourced 96-layer TLC NAND flash replacing 64-layer chips from Toshiba. The M8V Plus series comes in 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB variants, while the original M8V came in 128-thru-512 GB variants.

The Silicon Motion SM2258 controller under the hood of the M8V Plus, has been updated to its latest revision, and supports Plextor-innovated Plex Compress technology. This feature uses the controller's idle time to compress files that haven't been accessed for over 30 days. The Plex Turbo feature, which is essentially variable-size SLC cache, has also been improved to be larger in size. On-paper performance hasn't changed, with the company claiming up to 560 MB/s sequential reads, up to 520 MB/s sequential writes, up to 90,000 IOPS 4K random access for the 256 GB and 512 GB variants; and up to 88,000 IOPS random access for the 1 TB variant. The company rates write endurance for the 256 GB variant at 140 TBW, 512 GB variant at 280 TBW, and 560 TBW for the 1 TB variant. All three variants are backed by 3-year warranties. The company didn't reveal pricing.

IC Insights recently released its September Update to the 2020 McClean Report that presented the second of a two-part analysis on the global IC foundry industry and included a look at the pure-play foundry market by region.

China was responsible for essentially all of the total pure-play foundry market increase in 2018. In 2019, the U.S./China trade war slowed China's economic growth but its foundry marketshare still increased by two percentage points to 21%. Moreover, despite the Covid-19 shutdown of China's economy earlier this year, China's share of the pure-play foundry market is forecast to be 22% in 2020, 17 percentage points greater than it registered in 2010 (Figure 1).

Today, Toshiba has announced that it will officially be leaving the systems LSI (large scale integration) business. With this business unit, Toshiba used to provide design proposals and specifications for systems used for things like image processing, sensors, etc. However, it turns out that the unit is not profitable and Toshiba will be dissolving it. With this move, about 770 employees of the unit will be moved to another work place or be provided with an early retirement plan. Despite ending the business in making SoCs, Toshiba is still going to support existing customers. What is going to be next for Toshiba is the area of analog ICs and microcontrollers for motors, which is supposedly more profitable than the past business unit. All of the resources used in the LSI group will be redirected to the new plan.

Direct-attached performance from network-attached devices is no longer a thing of storage architects' dreams. KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.), is now sampling Ethernet SSDs to select partners and customers interested in validating the benefits of Ethernet attached storage to their existing Ethernet (RoCEv2) networks. KIOXIA has been working in collaboration with key industry players Marvell, Foxconn-Ingrasys and Accton to bring groundbreaking Ethernet Bunch of Flash (EBOF) technology solutions to market - and this announcement is pivotal to that endeavor.

In an ongoing quest to contain explosive amounts of data, storage capacity and bandwidth must continue to grow while processing time must decrease. An EBOF system addresses these challenges through an Ethernet fabric that can scale flash and optimally disaggregate storage from compute. The EBOF storage solution bypasses the cost, complexity, and system limitations inherent with standard JBOF storage systems, which typically include a CPU, DRAM, HBA, and switch. This accelerates applications and workloads where disaggregated low-latency, high bandwidth, highly available storage is needed - bringing greatly improved performance and lower total cost of ownership to edge, enterprise and cloud data centers.

As of June 30, 2020, Backblaze had 142,630 spinning hard drives in our cloud storage ecosystem spread across four data centers. Of that number, there were 2,271 boot drives and 140,059 data drives. This review looks at the Q2 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. As always, we look forward to your comments.

Quarterly Hard Drive Failure Stats for Q2 2020
At the end of Q2 2020, Backblaze was using 140,059 hard drives to store customer data. For our evaluation we remove from consideration those drive models for which we did not have at least 60 drives (see why below). This leaves us with 139,867 hard drives in our review. The table below covers what happened in Q2 2020.

Toshiba, a Japanese technology company, has announced last week that is exiting the laptop business in full. In 2018, Toshiba has sold 80.1% of its shares in Dynabook Inc. to Sharp Corp., Japanese company as well, just focused on electronics manufacturing. In the press release issued on August 4th, last week, Toshiba has transferred the remaining 19.9% of shares in Dynabook to Sharp and thereby has officially left the laptop business. "As a result of this transfer, Dynabook has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sharp.", says the Toshiba press release. This is one end of an era, as Toshiba has been manufacturing laptops from 1985, until this day in a way. This is one last goodbye to Toshiba, your laptop legacy will be remembered. If you were/are an owner of a Toshiba laptop, tell us about your experiences in the comments down below.

The next generation of SAS has arrived, bringing improved performance, reliability and data protection along with it. Today, KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.) became the first 1 company to bring 24G SAS to server and storage applications with the introduction of its 6 th generation enterprise SAS SSD family. First demonstrated at Flash Memory Summit 2019, KIOXIA's new PM6 Series of enterprise SAS SSDs is built on 24G SAS technology.

Designed for modern IT infrastructures, 24G SAS doubles the data throughput of its predecessor, while implementing new features and enhancements to reach new application performance levels. An established leader in developing SAS SSDs, KIOXIA delivers never before seen SAS SSD performance and is the only SSD supplier to offer protection and recovery from two simultaneous die failure s in an SSD. The PM6 Series builds upon this history of best in cl ass performance and reliability over six generations of SAS drives.

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.

From introducing game-changing new technologies to being the first to deliver PCIe 4.0 U.3 SSDs, KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.), continues to demonstrate its commitment to delivering cutting-edge flash solutions. This dedication will be on full display at this week's Open Compute Project (OCP) Virtual Summit and Future Technologies Symposium, where KIOXIA will showcase its data center and enterprise solid state drive (SSD) portfolio.

At the Summit, KIOXIA will highlight its CM6 and CD6 Series PCIe 4.0 NVMe enterprise and data center SSDs, KumoScale storage software based on NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF ) and a new Software-Enabled Flash (SEF) technology that redefines digital storage. KIOXIA has the broadest portfolio of SSDs in the market, including SSDs for client PCs, data center, hyperscale, high-end servers and storage systems.

The introduction of Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology has enabled HDD manufacturers, such as Toshiba, to increase the capacity of their spinning platter drives beyond that of existing approaches. SMR technology is recognized as having an impact on write-speeds in drives where this technology is used, especially in the case of continuous random writing. For this reason, Toshiba products are carefully tailored to specific workloads and use cases.

For example, in use cases such as network-attached storage (NAS), where continuous random writing regularly occurs, Toshiba's current product line for consumers features the N300, which does not use SMR.

KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.) today announced the introduction of Software-Enabled FlashTM (SEF), a new technology that combines software flexibility, host control and flash native semantics into a flash native API and purpose-built controller. Targeted to data center directors, architects and developers, SEF technology makes flash easier to manage, more timely to deploy and more predictable in nature - putting the power in programmers' hands.

With hyperscale computing redefining storage and virtualization, the race is on to orchestrate digital storage for cloud applications in a way that drives greater efficiency at scale. Effectively and efficiently utilizing flash for stable, predictable latency in ever-changing cloud workloads through direct host management of flash will quickly be critical to realizing these much-needed efficiencies.

KIOXIA Europe (formerly Toshiba Memory) is pleased to announce the launch of KIOXIA branded consumer products including the company's microSDs, SDs, USB Memory and SSDs. KIOXIA and its group companies started to operate under its new company name on October 1st, 2019. After the brand name change of its business-to-business products, KIOXIA has launched the completely new look and feel of its consumer products in April 2020.

With its comprehensive portfolio of microSD, SD, USB memory and SSD, KIOXIA offers consumer products that are specifically designed for enabling end-users to store their digital way of life wherever and whenever they want. KIOXIA's consumer products are mainly focused and ideally suited for use with smartphones, tablets and PCs, in gaming, digital cameras and more.

Further cementing its position as a leading provider of storage for next-gen mobile devices, KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.), the U.S.-based subsidiary of KIOXIA Corporation, today announced that it has started sampling Universal Flash Storage (UFS) Ver. 3.1 embedded flash memory devices. Well suited for mobile applications requiring high-performance with low power consumption, the new lineup utilizes KIOXIA's cutting-edge BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory and is supported in four capacities: 128 gigabytes (GB), 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 terabyte (TB).

The new devices integrate BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory and a controller in a JEDEC-standard 11.5 x 13 mm package. The controller performs error correction, wear leveling, logical-to-physical address translation, and bad-block management for simplified system development. "KIOXIA was the first company to introduce UFS in 2013[4] and the first to offer UFS Ver. 3.0 last year and we continue to be at the forefront of UFS memory with this Ver. 3.1 announcement today," noted Scott Beekman, director of managed flash memory products for KIOXIA America, Inc. "Our newest offerings enable next-gen mobile devices to take full advantage of the connectivity benefits of 5G, leading to faster downloads and reduced lag time - and an improved user experience."

The PCI Express 4.0 specification was designed to double the performance of server and storage systems, pushing speeds up to 16.0 gigatransfers per second (GT/s) or 2 gigabits per second (Gb/s) throughput per lane, and driving new performance levels for cloud and enterprise applications. Today, KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.) announced that its lineup of CM6 and CD6 Series PCIe 4.0 NVM Express (NVMe ) enterprise and data center solid state drives (SSDs) are now shipping to customers.

An established leader in developing PCIe and NVMe SSDs, KIOXIA delivers never-before-seen performance. KIOXIA was the first company to publicly demonstrate PCIe 4.0 SSDs and is now the first to ship these next-generation drives. The CM6 and CD6 Series SSDs are compliant to the latest NVMe specification, and include key features such as in-band NVMe-MI, persistent event log, namespace granularity, and shared stream writes. Additionally, both drives are SFF-TA-1001 conformant (also known as U.3), which allows them to be used in tri-mode enabled backplanes, which can accept SAS, SATA or NVMe SSDs.

One of the big hardware industry changes of 2019 was the formal spin-off of Toshiba Memory as an entirely independent firm called Kioxia. This is big, because Toshiba is regarded as the inventor of NAND flash as we know it; and a pioneering firm with DRAM, NAND flash, and other forms of solid-state storage. Toshiba retains the hard disk business. Having formally begun operations only in Q4-2019, much of Kioxia's upcoming products are in development, but we still caught some of their latest SSDs that implement PCIe gen 4.0 and NVMe 1.4 protocol, besides some former-Toshiba products under new Kioxia branding. Kioxia is planning to make a big splash in the near future as its pioneering Twin BiCS Flash tech hits the market, besides scoring design wins with the automotive and data-center industries.

The CD6 and CM6 SSDs are star-attractions. The CD6 is designed for data-centers, and comes in capacities ranging all the way from 800 GB to 15 TB, with 1 to 3 DWPD endurance. It uses the next-generation U.3 (SFF-TA-1001) connector with PCI-Express 4.0 x4 physical-layer and NVMe 1.4 protocol. Among its security features are SIE, FIPS140-2, and SED Opal/Ruby. The drive is built in the 15 mm-thick 2.5-inch form-factor. The CM6 is its cousin, targeted at enterprise environments with higher mission-criticality. With capacities ranging from 800 GB to a staggering 30 TB, the drive offers sequential transfer-rates of up to 6,400 MB/s by leveraging PCI-Express 4.0 x4 and NVMe 1.4. Much like the CD6, the CM6 uses the new U.3 connector, and is built in the 15 mm form-factor. Endurance and security feature-set are identical to the CD6. We also spotted the 2+ year old rebranded XD5-series and PM5-series in fresh Kioxia colors. Lastly, there are the XG6 and XG6-P SSDs from 2019 transitioned to the Kioxia brand.

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

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

Kioxia Holdings Corporation, formerly Toshiba Memory Holdings Corporation, today announced that it is officially operating under its new corporate identity, effective immediately. "Kioxia's official brand launch is an important step in both our evolution as an independent company and our commitment to lead the industry into the new era of memory," said Stacy J. Smith, executive chairman of Kioxia Holdings Corporation. "The company will build on its history as a world leader in memory solutions to not only meet the memory demands of the future, but to also fulfill our mission to uplift the world with memory."

With its official launch, Kioxia has unveiled its new corporate logo and brand identity. The silver of Kioxia's new logo will be the company's official corporate color, meant to represent the superior quality of its memory technology. In addition to silver, the company will have communication colors including, light blue, magenta, light green, orange, yellow and light gray.