NZXT, a community-driven provider of PC hardware, software, and services today launches BLD Kit - a PC building kit that makes the experience of building a high-performance PC fun and achievable. Each BLD Kit box comes with everything needed to guide users through a PC building adventure— creating an experience perfect for families, first-timers, or for those who want an everything-in-one-place solution to building their own system.

The BLD Kit concept comes from years of user feedback, focus group builds, and a dedication to serving and growing the PC gaming community. Building a computer is a process that may seem daunting at first, but anyone can fall in love with it, with a little help and support. NZXT is also excited to announce that the limited-time NZXT GG sale for NZXT BLD is kicking off now. This 48-hour-only sale will have 10% off all custom PCs, pre-built PCs, and BLD Kits (US only) going from now until October 20th at 11:59pm.

Building on a unique and diverse product portfolio across HDD and flash, Western Digital today announced a suite of new NVMe SSDs for enabling next-generation, data-centric architectures for data centers, industrial IoT, automotive and client applications. The new family includes the Ultrastar DC ZN540 ZNS NVMe SSD for designing a more efficient data center storage tier with competitive TCO; the Western Digital IX SN530 Industrial SSD for the extreme environments of industrial and automotive applications; and the 2 TB WD Blue SN550 NVMe SSD for speeding up PC performance. Leveraging Western Digital's unique vertical integration capabilities - from designing and manufacturing its NAND flash to developing its own in-house SSD controllers and firmware - the new products underscore the company's continued strength and commitment in driving storage innovation for new system architectures, applications and use cases for global customers across cloud, OEM, enterprise, channel and retail end-user markets.

The amount of data created over the next three years will be more than the data created over the past 30 years, according to IDC. Billions of connected systems will generate a myriad of contextualized data sets from smart video to consumer and sensor data, which must be captured, transformed and analyzed to bring value to industries, businesses and people. Legacy architectures cannot keep up with today's data-intensive environments. The challenge is how to efficiently and cost-effectively build the data infrastructure that will keep up with data demands of the zettabyte-scale era. Storage is critical and fundamental to creating these new architectures and extracting value from data.

Western Digital unveiled the WD Blue SN550 line of M.2 NVMe SSDs. A successor to the WD Blue SN500, the SN550 is updated with a new controller that utilizes PCI-Express 3.0 x4 (compared to just x2 on the SN500). Designed in-house by WD and SanDisk, the controller is based on the same architecture as the one that drives the WD Black SN750, but is DRAM-less, and has fewer flash channels. Speaking of which, WD deployed 96-layer 3D TLC NAND flash, and wants the drive to compete in pricing with QLC NAND-based drives such as the Crucial P1. The 250 GB variant is priced at USD $54, the 500 GB variant $65, and the 1 TB variant $99.

All three variants take advantage of the increased PCIe bandwidth to offer sequential read speeds of up to 2,400 MB/s (the SN500 capped out at 1,700 MB/s). Write speeds vary, with the 250 GB variant offering up to 950 MB/s, the 500 GB variant up to 1,750 MB/s, and the 1 TB variant up to 1,950 MB/s. Endurance figures (TBW) of the three variants are rated at 150 TB for the 250 GB variant, 300 TB for the 500 GB variant, and 600 TB for the 1 TB variant. An interesting design choice with these drives is pushing the NAND flash chip and the controller as far apart on the PCB as possible, for less concentration of heat. All three models are backed by 5-year warranties.