Today Toshiba Memory America, Inc., the U.S.-based subsidiary of Toshiba Memory Corporation, unveiled a new, game-changing category of SAS SSDs expected to replace SATA SSDs in server applications. The RM5 12Gbit/s value SAS (vSAS) series features capacity, performance, reliability, manageability and data security advantages - at a price that obsoletes SATA SSDs.

A homogeneous SAS environment has long been the gold standard for enterprise server and storage systems. With vertical integration expertise in flash technology, firmware and controller design, Toshiba leveraged its leading position as the world's leading SAS SSD line optimizing RM5 to close the cost gap with SATA - and usher in a new class of SSD. SATA simply cannot compete with SAS, falling well short in terms of performance, robustness and encryption options.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today launched the new REXP-1610U-RP and REXP-1210U-RP expansion enclosures that support 6 Gbps SATA hard drives and SSDs. Designed for expanding the storage space of a QNAP NAS, the new expansion enclosures provide a flexible and budget-friendly solution for organizations to tackle applications with intense data growth (such as archiving, high-resolution media storage, and video surveillance) without needing a large up-front investment.

"The rampant growth of data makes a flexible storage expansion solution a priority for organizations," said David Tsao, Product Manager of QNAP, adding "QNAP provides a wide range of expansion enclosures with various transmission interfaces and price points, fulfilling the need for higher capacity and lower costs to resolve the needs of data storage and backup."

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has begun mass producing the industry's largest capacity Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid state drive (SSD) - the PM1643 - for use in next-generation enterprise storage systems. Leveraging Samsung's latest V-NAND technology with 64-layer, 3-bit 512-gigabit (Gb) chips, the 30.72 terabyte (TB) drive delivers twice the capacity and performance of the previous 15.36 TB high-capacity lineup introduced in March 2016.

This breakthrough was made possible by combining 32 of the new 1TB NAND flash packages, each comprised of 16 stacked layers of 512 Gb V-NAND chips. These super-dense 1 TB packages allow for approximately 5,700 5-gigabyte (GB), full HD movie files to be stored within a mere 2.5-inch storage device.

Seagate Technology plc today announced the launch of the 5U84 high-density enclosure built with a next-generation operating system that together delivers performance, capacity and reliability. The 5U84 enclosure and firmware technology will enable businesses to store massive quantities of data in a high-availability enclosure that provides high performance access to data. What's more, Seagate Systems' operating system not only powers the high density 5U84, but dramatically improves the system's performance and reliability, increasing confidence in using high-density enclosures.

As with any technology, it is critically important to create layers of protection when it comes to data storage, particularly in markets such as video surveillance, where the integrity of the data is critical. Using next generation data protection technology, Seagate's Advanced Distributed Autonomic Protection Technology (ADAPT) can eliminate up to 95% of performance degradation during a disk drive rebuild when compared to traditional RAID solutions, meaning the 5U84 is essentially "self-healing". The technology disperses data across multiple drives, allocating more resources to rebuilds, thereby reducing the time needed, minimizing the risk of a data unavailability issue and giving the end user uninterrupted access.

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 America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC), a committed technology leader, announces the AL15SE Series HDD, its next generation of 10,500 rpm enterprise performance hard disk drives for mission critical servers and storage. The new drive series boasts a 2,400 GB capacity model - a 33 percent capacity increase over Toshiba's AL14SE generation and Toshiba's largest capacity ever for a 10,500 rpm HDD.

Built to deliver superior low-latency performance, the AL15SE Series supports 12 Gbit/s SAS dual-port interface to optimize the host transfer rate. All models utilize a space-efficient, power-saving 2.5 inch , 15 mm form-factor. Advanced Format models support 4K native and 512e emulated sector technologies and increase areal density in capacities ranging from 600 GB to 2,400 GB and feature a 15 percent increase in sustained transfer rate over the prior AL14SE generation. New 512n sector technology models increase areal density in capacities ranging from 300 GB to 1,200 GB.

ASRock Rack, a new division of ASRock which deals with enterprise-grade motherboards, introduced the C3758D4I-4L, a mini-ITX motherboard based on the Atom C3758 "Denverton" SoC that embeds an 8-core CPU clocked at 2.20 GHz, 16 MB of cache, and a dual-channel DDR4 integrated memory controller supporting up to 256 GB of ECC memory, topped off with a 25W TDP. These specs lend Denverton quasi-enterprise credentials. The C3758D4I-4L can be used for low-cost rack-mount web-servers, or even high-end DIY NAS or home-server builds.

The C3758D4I-4L comes with a factory-fitted fan-heatsink cooling the pre-installed Atom C3758 BGA SoC. The board draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX and 8-pin EPS power connectors (including a 4-pin connector for external 12V). The SoC is wired to four DDR4 DIMM slots, supporting up to 128 GB of dual-channel ECC memory; and a PCI-Express 3.0 x8 slot. Storage connectivity includes a staggering 13 SATA 6 Gbps ports, five on board, eight via two mini SAS connectors. An ASPeed AST2500 provides display, legacy I/O, and remote management. The board features a staggering five 1 GbE connections with teaming, PXE, and NCSI support. The company didn't reveal pricing.

As computing systems advance and performance is increased, there is also increased need for sufficient storage space to store the results of data processing. Emerging trends and developments in storage technology have seen the promise of new, magnetic-based technologies such as Western Digital's own MAMR technology, which is expected to bring up to 40 TB HDDs in the near future. Until those days are with us, however, improvements on current platter-based technologies are consistent and dependable, with increasing storage space capacities and densities having been delivered by companies in the last few years.

Western Digital has now begun shipping up to 14 TB HDDs, on their UltraStar HS14 family of Enterprise drives, which bring storage areal density up to a staggering 1034 Gb/in². This level of areal storage density was achieved with recourse to SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) technology, though, which means performance in rewriting already written-to sectors will be somewhat decreased when compared to other HDDs that don't employ this particular technology. These helium-filled HDDs have a 7200 RPM spindle speed and a 512 MB cache to aid offsetting this performance penalty, though. The UltraStar HS14 HDDs also offer numerous technologies to increase reliability and durability of the drive, which, with its Enterprise classification, promise to deliver 2.5 million hours MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) accompanied by a five-year warranty. Available interfaces are SATA 6 Gb/s and SAS 12 Gb/s, with the drives being able to sustain transfer rates in the order of 233 MB/s.

Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC), a committed technology leader, today unveiled the development of two new flagship enterprise solid state drive (SSD) solutions, the TMC PM5 12 Gbit/s SAS series and the CM5 NVM Express (NVMe) series. Development is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter. Both product lines are built with TMC's latest 64 layer, 3-bit-per-cell enterprise-class TLC (triple-level cell) BiCS FLASH2, making it possible for today's demanding storage environments to expand the use of flash with cost-optimized 3D flash memory. With all-new, advanced features, the innovative CM5 and PM5 series raise the bar in performance capabilities and create new opportunities for businesses to leverage the power of flash storage.

Offering up to 30.72TB in a 2.5-inch form factor, the TMC PM5 series introduces a full range of endurance and capacity SAS SSDs enabling data centers to effectively address big data demands while streamlining storage deployments. With the industry's first MultiLink SAS architecture, the PM5 series is able to deliver the fastest performance the market has seen from a SAS-based SSD with up to 3,350 MB/s of sequential read and 2,720 MB/s of sequential write6 in MultiLink mode and up to 400,000 random read IOPS in narrow or MultiLink mode. The PM5 series' 4-port MultiLink design is an additional technology to achieve high performance, close to PCI EXPRESS (PCIe)8 SSDs, enabling legacy infrastructures to increase productivity without having to be re-architected from the ground up. Furthermore, PM5 SSDs support multi-stream write technology, a feature that intelligently manages and groups data types to minimize write amplification and minimize garbage collection, translating into reduced latency, improved endurance, increased performance and Quality of Service (QoS).

If there's one thing enthusiasts usually complain regarding SSDs is that here doesn't seem to exist any viable alternatives to a good old high-capacity platter-based drives. Where are my 2 TB SSDs for 200$? How can I possibly save my entire music library in this puny 512 GB SSD that has already cost me my arms and legs?

Well, those answers might not be coming anytime soon (even though the advent of QLC NAND might change that.) In the meantime, we can put our eyes on Viking Technology, so as to see that a halo SSD product can achieve amazing storage capacity in a standard form factor. The company has just started selling their UHC (Ultra High Capacity) Silo Series, which leverage SK Hynix's MLC NAND (if the capacity doesn't put your $ klaxons running, the use of MLC should.) The SSDs leverage a 6 GB/s SAS interface, and deliver 500 MB/s read and 350 MB/s write speeds. The manufacturer says these can sustain up to 60,000 IOPS on random reads, and 15,000 IOPS on random writes. These may sound low in high-performance terms (and they sort of are), but remember these are products geared for the enterprise market. Pricing wasn't (maybe smartly) disclosed. I believe I'd laugh maniacally should I know how much they cost. However, if you must have a high-capacity SSD, you know where to look for.

GIGABYTE today announced its latest generation of servers based on Intel's Skylake Purley architecture. This new generation brings a wealth of new options in scalability - across compute, network and storage - to deliver solutions for any application, from the enterprise to the data center to HPC. (Jump ahead to system introductions).

This server series adopts Intel's new product family - officially named the 'Intel Xeon Scalable family' and utilizes its ability to meet the increasingly diverse requirements of the industry, from entry-level HPC to large scale clusters.. The major development in this platform is around the improved features and functionality at both the host and fabric levels. These enable performance improvements - both natively on chip and for future extensibility through compute, network and storage peripherals. In practical terms, these new CPUs will offer up to 28 cores, and 48 PCIe lanes per socket.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today launched the TVS-882BR Blu-ray NAS series (including the TVS-882BR and TVS-882BRT3 models). QNAP also announced a partnership with Fengtao Software to provide an all-in-one backup solution with its DVDFab software. DVDFab provides a complete solution for backing up disc-based files to the NAS for more convenient storage while also enabling NAS-based files to be written to discs for disaster recovery purposes. The TVS-882BRT3 also features four Thunderbolt 3 ports, providing a highly-efficient collaborative environment for media professionals, while also allowing instant writing of their creative works to disc. The TVS-882BR can also serve as a Blu-ray player, allowing direct playback via HDMI using Linux Station or Virtualization Station (third-party media player software required - may require separate license purchase).

"The TVS-882BR series - available with a pre-installed Blu-ray Disc drive or an empty 5.25-inch bay - takes a unique place in the QNAP NAS line-up by enabling users to directly consolidate optical disc-based data to their NAS for easier management and sharing. The ability to write data to discs also provides another layer of data protection alongside modern NAS and cloud-based methods," said Dan Lin, Product Manager of QNAP. "With robust hardware and M.2 SATA 6Gb/s support, the TVS-882BR provides users with a complete range of IT solutions, including deploying resource-demanding virtualization applications, online collaboration, and building a shared Blu-ray NAS workstation," Lin added.

Western Digital Corp., a global data storage technology and solutions leader, today announced the HGST-branded Ultrastar SS300, the company's highest-performing SAS SSD to date. It is the latest addition to the company's family of Ultrastar 12Gb/s SAS SSDs, which are used to meet the rigorous data demands of many of the world's largest companies today. Developed in partnership with Intel, the new Ultrastar SS300 delivers best-in-class random performance, offering speeds of up to 400,000 IOPS random read and up to 200,000 IOPS random write.

"Today, we raise the bar with our newest 12 Gb/s SAS SSD, the Ultrastar SS300," said Ulrich Hansen, vice president of SSD product marketing at Western Digital. "Built with high-endurance 3D NAND flash memory, the Ultrastar SS300 offers best-in-class speed, outstanding capacity and intelligent power options that enable customers to tailor storage systems and server solutions that are just right for their demanding needs. These benefits are delivered with the same tremendous reliability that has helped to make Ultrastar 12 Gb/s SAS SSDs popular around the globe."

Western Digital Corp. today announced that it has begun shipping its fourth-generation helium-based hard drive with its 12TB HGST-branded Ultrastar He12 hard drive. The Ultrastar He12 12TB hard drive is the next generation of the company's award-winning high capacity enterprise-class drive with HelioSeal technology, providing customers with a data storage solution addressing the expansive information management needs and demanding performance requirements of today's enterprise, cloud and hyperscale workloads.

"We have again raised the bar in enterprise storage with the industry's most advanced and cost-effective highest capacity helium HDD storage solutions," said Mark Grace, senior vice president of devices at Western Digital. "The Ultrastar He12 hard drive advances Western Digital's portfolio leveraging the HelioSeal platform to deliver industry-leading high capacity HDD storage with exceptional power efficiency. Western Digital has shipped over 15M helium-based high capacity drives to date and continues to support our customers with outstanding reliability and Quality of Service (QoS). Our industry-leading data center portfolio enables customers across the spectrum to meet their evolving and dynamic data center demand."

Western Digital Corp. today further expanded its data center SSD and HDD portfolio with the introduction of next-generation storage solutions designed to help IT managers address the intensive data and extreme performance demands of today's enterprise, cloud and hyperscale workloads.

The new solutions include the blazingly fast HGST-branded Ultrastar SN200 NVMe-compatible PCIe solid-state drive (SSD) series, which offers class-leading random read performance of up to 1.2 million IOPS in key workloads, and the company's fastest and highest capacity SAS SSD to date, the HGST-branded Ultrastar SS200 Series SSD. The company also introduced its fourth-generation helium-based HelioSeal enterprise-class hard disk drive (HDD), the 12TB HGST-branded Ultrastar He12 drive. Additionally, the company announced it will extend the He12 platform to 14TB, leveraging Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR).

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced that its popular HGST-branded Ultrastar SN150 PCI Express (PCIe) NVMe solid state drive (SSD) is now certified for use with VMware Virtual SAN and vSphere. Optimized for easy set-up, the Ultrastar SN150 SSD for VMWare environments reduces latency, and brings hyperscale-level performance and enhanced Quality of Service (QoS) time to virtualized servers and cloud storage. This can significantly lower the total cost of ownership of VMware storage environments over traditional storage architectures by reducing performance tuning and field support costs. In server-side environments where VMware virtualization management is utilized, the Ultrastar SN150 is an ideal option for data center managers building or deploying systems on VMware Virtual SAN or vSphere.

Part of Western Digital's HGST-branded Ultrastar data center storage solutions family, the certified Ultrastar SN150 is available in a low-profile, half-height, half-length (HHHL), add-in card form factor and is one of the first NVMe SSDs in the industry to utilize VMware's in-box NVMe driver. For data center administrators, this helps eliminate the hassle of time-consuming downloads and configurations, and allows faster deployment. The Ultrastar SN150 drive is available in capacities ranging from 1120GB1 to 3820GB and offers speeds which exceed Virtual SAN's highest performance class (Class F) specifications, enabling it to easily address the heaviest data workloads in a variety of virtualized server and storage configurations, including all-flash and hybrid configurations utilizing flash for caching and hard disk drives for storage capacity.

Seagate Technology announced today at the Flash Memory Summit conference two new flash innovations that extend the limits of storage computing performance in enterprise data centers to unprecedented levels. The new products include a 60 terabyte (TB) Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid-state-drive (SSD) - the largest SSD ever demonstrated - and the 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD. These two new products represent the high performance end of Seagate's Enterprise portfolio - a complete ecosystem of HDD, SSD and storage system products designed to help customers manage the deluge of data they face and move the right data where it's needed fast to meet rapidly evolving business priorities and market demands.

The 60TB SAS SSD and 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD are the newest additions to Seagate's data center portfolio and are designed to help enterprise IT leaders obtain more value from the rapidly expanding amount of data they must contend with, even under the most demanding application requirements. The 60TB SAS SSD features twice the density and four times the capacity of the next highest-capacity SSD available today - equivalent to the capacity needed to accommodate 400 million photos on a typical social media platform, or 12,000 DVD movies. This single controller architecture also delivers the lowest cost per gigabyte for flash available today.

At the 2016 Flash Memory Summit, Samsung unveiled a massive 32-terabyte solid state drive (SSD) for enterprise applications. The drive leverages the company's 4th generation, 64-layer 3D V-NAND flash memory, making it the company's highest-capacity SSD, upping the 15.36 TB drive the company unveiled in March, 2016. The drive is built in the 12 mm-thick, 2.5-inch form-factor, and features the SAS 12 Gb/s interface. At the summit, the company announced that it plans to have 100 TB SSDs ready by 2020.

Accusys Storage Ltd. today announced that it will be launching its latest addition to its innovative Thunderbolt 3 shareable storage product line (T-share), the A12T3-Share at NAB 2016. The 12-bay tower storage unit offers four Thunderbolt 3 ports allowing connection to four clients which are able to simultaneously edit, transfer and share data at unprecedented speeds. Using 10 TB HDD, the A12T3-Share can reach a storage capacity of 120 TB and this can be expanded to 480 TB.

"For media professionals, content creators, gamers, or anyone that works with 4K content, Thunderbolt 3 can offer a faster and simpler experience," said Jason Ziller, Director of Thunderbolt Marketing, Intel. "By utilizing Thunderbolt 3, the latest T-share device from Accusys is able to couple high-performance with large capacity offering users a robust storage solution."

Micron Technology, Inc. today announced a new portfolio of PCIe solid state drives (SSDs) that leverage the high-performance NVMe protocol. The new Micron 9100 and 7100 PCIe SSDs provide data center customers with purpose-built storage products for implementing an agile, scale-out IT infrastructure. These new drives extend Micron's rich portfolio of SATA and SAS SSDs that enable customers to extend and improve their legacy data center infrastructure with proven flash products.

Customers are disaggregating storage from Storage Area Networks (SANs) and frame-based arrays, moving toward server-based storage as a solution because of today's changing computing landscape, which is largely driven by the influx of data being created, accessed and stored from the proliferation of mobile devices and cloud computing. Many of today's leading hyperscale companies, who have taken advantage of server-based storage, have deployed Micron memory and storage in their data centers, giving them consistent, accelerated access to the world's data wherever they are, whenever they want and from any device.

Intel Corporation today announced a range of new technologies, investments and industry collaborations aimed at making it easier to deploy agile and scalable clouds so businesses can deliver new services faster and drive revenue growth. Businesses want flexibility and choice in cloud deployment models to support innovation while maintaining control of their most strategic assets. Despite a willingness to invest in modern software-defined infrastructure (SDI), businesses find the prospect of doing so themselves to be complex and time-consuming.

Intel is easing the path with new processors, solid state drives and a range of industry collaborations to help businesses deliver new services at the scale and speed previously found only in the most advanced public clouds. "Enterprises want to benefit from the efficiency and agility of cloud architecture and on their own terms - using the public cloud offerings, deploying their own private cloud, or both," said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group. "The result is pent-up demand for software-defined infrastructure. Intel is investing to mature SDI solutions and provide a faster path for businesses of all sizes to reap the benefits of the cloud."

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.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, announced today that it is now shipping the industry's largest solid state drive (SSD) - the "PM1633a," a 15.36 terabyte (TB) drive. First revealed at the 2015 Flash Memory Summit in August, the 15.36TB SSD is based on a 12Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface, for use in enterprise storage systems. Because the PM1633a comes in a 2.5-inch form factor, enterprise storage managers can fit twice as many of the drives in a standard 19-inch, 2U rack, compared to an equivalent 3.5-inch storage drive

"To satisfy an increasing market need for ultra-high-capacity SAS SSDs from leading enterprise storage system manufacturers, we are directing our best efforts toward meeting our customers' SSD requests," said Jung-bae Lee, Senior Vice President, Memory Product Planning and Application Engineering Team, Samsung Electronics. "We will continue to lead the industry with next-generation SSDs, using our advanced 3D V-NAND memory technology, in order to accelerate the growth of the premium memory market while delivering greater performance and efficiency to our customers."

Toshiba Corporation's Semiconductor & Storage Products Company today announced the availability of a new very read-intensive, enterprise SAS solid state drive (SSD) - the PX04SL series. The PX04SL series is optimized for read-intensive application workloads such as data warehousing, web servers, media streaming and video on demand (VOD). Sample shipments start today.

The PX04SL can offer the most cost-effective solutions in Toshiba's PX04S generation of SAS interface enterprise SSDs. Available in 2TB[1] and 4TB capacities, the PX04SL enables organizations to minimize total cost of ownership (TCO) without sacrificing performance. With sustained random read performance of 270K IOPS[2], the PX04SL helps read-intensive application workloads achieve superior results. To combat bottlenecks, this SAS SSD provides high-density storage for efficient data throughput to deliver high performance, reliability and endurance for maximum application scalability.

Seagate Technology plc, a world leader in storage solutions, today launched its first 10TB enterprise capacity hard disk drive (HDD), merging high capacity with the industry's lowest power and weight available in a 10TB drive, to meet the growing storage requirements for private and public cloud-based data centers. The Seagate Enterprise 3.5 Capacity HDD has been selected by enterprise market leaders globally for its ability to address storage demands unlike any other technology in the industry.

"Cloud-based data center storage needs are expanding faster than many current infrastructures can sustain, rendering the capacity demands of users a herculean task for cloud managers," said Mark Re, senior vice president and chief technology officer, Seagate. "Built on our years of research and development of sealed-drive technology, our new helium-based enterprise drive is designed precisely to help data-centric organizations worldwide solve the needs of their growing storage business."