When it comes to data, everything is growing - quantity, size, format, resolution, use cases, applications, value and more. As people and businesses look for solutions to effectively and efficiently store their data in the zettabyte era, Western Digital HDDs continue to play a critical role in delivering massive capacity, performance and reliability.

Extending its innovation and technology leadership across its portfolio, Western Digital today announced that it is now shipping new 22 TB HDDs targeting three key segments: WD Gold HDDs for IT/data center channel customers; WD Red Pro for network attached storage (NAS); and WD Purple Pro for smart video/surveillance. As highlighted in its What's Next Western Digital Event, these new drives are loaded with industry-firsts, including OptiNAND technology, energy-assisted PMR (ePMR), triple-stage actuator (TSA) and HelioSeal to deliver the industry's highest areal density at 2.2 TB per platter, delivering 22 TB CMR HDDs for its customers.

With only three major players left in the hard disk drive market-Seagate, Toshiba and WDC-the shipment of hard drives ought to be fairly stable, but demand is down across all manufacturers by anything from close to 30 percent to around 40 percent in the case of Toshiba. According to data from Trendfocus that was posted by Storage Newsletter, demand is down across all market segments or at best case flat compared to last year. Nearline enterprise drives remained flat at around 19 million units compared to last year, but performance enterprise storage is down to around 2.5 million units for the last quarter.

On the desktop and consumer electronics side of things, things are even more dire, with both 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drive shipments dropping by 30 and 40 percent respectively. Around 13 million 3.5-inch hard drives and 11 million 2.5-inch drives were still shipped in Q2, but with lower demand for computers and more and more computers moving to SSDs, hard drives have been relegated to backup duties when it comes to most consumer purchases. Seagate was the company least affected by the drop in demand, but is still seeing close to a 30 percent drop in demand, with WDC second at over 30 percent and Toshiba, as mentioned, by maybe as much as 40 percent, which doesn't bode well for the company, as it's the smallest manufacturer of hard drives.

Kingston Digital, Inc., the flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., a world leader in memory products and technology solutions, today announces the addition of the DataTraveler Max Type-A. It joins DataTraveler Max, the USB Type-C model, to complete the Kingston DT Max series of next-gen, high performance USB flash drives. Both drives leverage the latest USB 3.2 Gen 2 standard.

The DataTraveler Max (DT Max) series delivers record-breaking speeds up to 1,000 MB/s read and 900 MB/s write to make them some of the fastest USB drives on the market and the first of its kind. DT Max is designed with portability and convenience in mind. DT Max Type-A features a merlot and black design with Type-A connector, while the original DT Max features an all-black design with Type-C connector to differentiate the drives at first glance. The unique ridged casing protects the connector when it is not in use and is easy to move in a single motion. Seamlessly transfer and store large digital files such as HD photos, 4K/8K videos, music and more with top speeds and high capacities up to 1TB3. The addition of a keyring loop and LED status indicator makes the drive ideal for users who need storage on-the-go.

Phison Electronics Corp., a global leader in NAND flash and storage solutions, and Cigent Technology, Inc., the leader in embedded cybersecurity technology, today announced an innovative partnership program called Cigent Secure SSD Ready. This strategic partnership embeds select Phison storage devices and controllers with Cigent's built-in cybersecurity enhancements - features that Phison's storage partners can easily switch on and resell as an option to their global channel partners and customers.

"We couldn't be more excited about our exclusive partnership with Cigent to equip selected Phison products with the most secure storage solution on the market," said Sebastien Jean, CTO, Phison. "Phison OEM partners and PC OEMs now have a turnkey solution that provides unparalleled storage-based data security across the entire storage ecosystem/PC supply chain."

Phison Electronics Corp., a global leader in NAND flash controller and storage solutions, today unveiled two new PCIe Gen4x4 Enterprise Class SSDs: the EPR3750 in M.2 2280 form factor and the EPR3760 in M.2 22110 form factor. The EPR3750 and EPR3760 SSDs are backward compatible in PCIe Gen3 M.2 slots at even faster speeds while offering significant performance enhancements when matched with PCIe Gen4 chipsets. Also, the EPR3750 and EPR3760 SSDs provide a faster quality of service (QoS) command execution with Enterprise SSD firmware. Workstation and Server boot applications require consistent and predictable performance from storage. Phison's new SSDs are ideal to use as boot drives in workstations, servers, and in Network Attached Storage (NAS) and RAID environments.

DataLocker, Inc., a leading provider of encryption solutions, today announced that the company's recently announced DataLocker Sentry K350 encrypted flash drive is in stock and now available for order with expanded storage capacities up to 512 GB. The company first introduced the K350 in Q4 of 2021 as an expansion of the product line aimed at bridging the gap of managing encrypted USB devices with the flexibility to connect to any machine that supports USB Mass Storage regardless of the operating system, all developed around DataLocker's "Simply Secure" design principles.

The new firmware release for K350 enables boot of operating systems while keeping the device under full management control, critical functionality for administrators of air gapped and microsegmented machines across industries. The Sentry K350 is the industry's only platform-independent and OS agnostic keypad flash drive which incorporates an OLED display and represents the next generation of encrypted data storage products. In addition to the display's true alpha-numeric password-based authentication, the Sentry K350 offers users a full-featured, visual-based menu-driven system to easily change passwords, set password policy and enable other security features without needing to consult a user manual. Further enhancing the feature set is the achievement of the FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certification, the MIL-Std810G, and an IP67 rating making it both secure and rugged enough for any environment.

SD Association (SDA) today announced three advanced security features in the new SD 9 specification: Boot support, Trusted Computing Group (TCG) Storage and Replay Protected Memory Block (RPMB) authenticated memory. SD 9 gives device manufacturers the ability to use an SD memory card for all memory and storage needs, simplifying future device upgrades or repairs and enhancing security capabilities for applications when the cards are tightly bound to specific hosts. SD 9 defines Fast Boot and Secure Boot capabilities giving cards the ability to serve as a device's boot code memory while offering a simple fast boot code uploading process along with secured methods of providing future boot code updates. SD 9 adds TCG secured storage by adding self-encrypted drive functionality. The specification defines RPMB as a secured hidden memory accessible only through a secured authentication process, while also providing a secured boot code update process, plus write-protect and replay protection security mechanisms.

Devices ideally suited for the new capabilities defined by SD 9 include Chromebook computers, tablets, drones, surveillance cameras, dash cameras, gaming consoles, virtual reality (VR) headsets/glasses, small IoT modules and wearable medical devices, to name a few. SD 9 also helps product manufacturers meet new right to repair regulations and simplifies upgrade and repair processes for devices installed in locations without internet connectivity. "SD memory cards are a compelling choice for both storage and memory because they will boot devices, are capable of delivering SSD performance levels and simplify device repairs or upgrades," said Hiroyuki Sakamoto, SDA president. "The SD 9 specification gives product manufacturers a compelling array of choices when defining memory and storage needs of devices." The optional features defined in SD 9 are available to both microSD and full-sized SD memory card form factors. The features are applicable across all capacity types, from SD to the forthcoming SDUC memory cards. Importantly, these features will be supported by SD Express, capable of delivering SSD performance levels up to 4 GB/sec. The SDA has prepared a whitepaper providing more details about the compelling new features defined by SD 9 for SD memory cards.

Micron Technology, Inc., today announced new client solid-state drives (SSDs) that bring NVMe performance to client computing applications, freeing laptops, workstations and other portables from legacy architectures that can rob devices of battery power, performance and productivity. The Micron 2300 SSD combines the power and density needed to drive compute-heavy applications in a compact form factor with the reduced power consumption modern mobile users demand. For the first time, Micron brings together NVMe performance and low-cost quad-level-cell (QLC) NAND in the Micron 2210 QLC SSD. It combines fast NVMe throughput and Micron's leadership in QLC technology to offer flash capabilities at hard disk drive-like price points while reducing power consumption by 15 times when compared to hard drives.

"Ninety percent of client platforms will ship NVMe SSDs within the next year, and the market is fast bifurcating into mainstream and value market segments," said Roger Peene, vice president of marketing, Storage Business Unit, Micron. "Our two new client SSDs, the 2300 and 2210, are optimized for each segment. The 2300 offers outstanding power performance, while the 2210 delivers compelling price performance by using Micron's industry-leading QLC NAND." Both SSDs introduced today are built on Micron's innovative 96-layer 3D NAND technology to deliver power savings, right-sized capacity and compact form factors that enable flexible designs. They also deliver enhanced client security features and capabilities for protecting data, with TCG Opal 2.0 and TCG Pyrite 2.0 support.

Samsung and Western Digital today signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that implies that the two companies will join their efforts to create next-generation data placement, processing, and fabrics (D2PF) storage technologies. The MOU states that the two companies will collaborate on creating Zoned Storage devices, including ZNS (Zoned Namespaces) SSDs and SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) HDDs. The ZNS SSD initiative is a challenge of creating entirely new SSDs that work on the ZNS principle instead of traditional block-based drives. Opposite to data in traditional SSDs written in blocks, ZNS SSDs will place data into zones and have software understand where each bit of information is written without excessive read/write action. Another benefit of ZNS is that managing data allows less garbage collection, thus higher efficiency.

Software adoption for ZNS makes it hard, and Samsung's conjoined efforts with Western Digital aim to simplify it. Western Digital notes that "In addition, this collaboration is expected to serve as a starting point to expand zone-based (e.g. ZNS, SMR) device interfaces, as well as future-generation, high-capacity storage devices with enhanced data placement and processing technologies. At a later stage, these initiatives will be expanded to include other emerging D2PF technologies such as computational storage and storage fabrics including NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF)." So, with further development of ZNS, Samsung and Western Digital will collab on more advanced storage options as well.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today launched the new QXP-1600eS-A1164 quad-port external SATA expansion card. Designed for QNAP TL series SATA JBOD, the QXP-1600eS-A1164 is compatible with QNAP NAS, Windows /Ubuntu PCs and servers with a PCIe port. Each SATA lane directly connects to a single SATA drive to deliver excellent transfer performance.

"The new QXP-1600eS-A1164 SATA expansion card doesn't need any drivers and provides a more convenient solution than its previous generation. It can be used with a QNAP TL SATA JBOD for expanding the capacity of NAS or PCs to provide future-proof scalability." said Candice Chiang, Product Manager of QNAP. The QXP-1600eS-A1164 can be used with QNAP SATA JBOD (supported from QTS 4.5.4 or QuTS hero h4.5.4), including setting RAID parameters and creating a storage pool using the Storage and Snapshots app. When the QXP-1600eS-A1164 is installed in a Windows or Ubuntu device, the QNAP JBOD Manager desktop utility can be used to quickly obtain and view information about the JBOD status, health, fan speed, and check for firmware updates.

Excelero, a Tel Aviv-based provider of high-performance software-defined storage, is now a part of NVIDIA. The company's team of engineers—including its seasoned co-founders with decades of experience in HPC, storage and networking—bring deep expertise in the block storage that large businesses use in storage-area networks.

Now their mission is to help expand support for block storage in our enterprise software stack such as clusters for high performance computing. Block storage also has an important role to play inside the DOCA software framework that runs on our DPUs.

Continuing to lead the way forward for UFS technology, KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced sampling of the industry's first Universal Flash Storage (UFS)3 embedded flash memory devices supporting MIPI M-PHY v5.04. The new lineup utilizes the company's BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory and is available in three capacities: 128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB. The new devices deliver high speed read and write performance and are targeted to a variety of mobile applications, including leading-edge smartphones.

The new KIOXIA devices are next-generation UFS (MIPI M-PHY 5.0), which has a theoretical interface speed of up to 23.2 Gbps per lane (x2 lanes = 46.4 Gpbs) in HS-GEAR mode. Sequential read and write performance of the 256 GB device is improved by approximately 90 percent and 70 percent, respectively, over previous generation devices. Also, random read and write performance of the 256 GB device is improved by approximately 35 percent and 60 percent, respectively, over previous generation devices. This next generation of UFS provides significant increases in performance, enabling next-generation smartphones and other products to enhance their capabilities and end user experiences in the 5G era and beyond.

Toshiba Corporation held an investor relations event in Tokyo, Japan. During Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation's presentation, Mr. Hiroyuki Sato, President & CEO of TDSC, unveiled a descriptive roadmap of Toshiba's next-generation Nearline HDDs. Data generation continues to grow at a double digit rates every year, and demand from cloud companies to store the burgeoning data is driving the need for higher capacity HDDs. To meet this surging demand, Toshiba plans to leverage its proprietary recording technologies, FC-MAMR (Flux-Controlled - Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording), MAS-MAMR (Microwave Assisted Switching - Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording), and Disk Stacking technology to lift Nearline HDD capacities to 30 TB by FY2023, and greater capacities beyond.

"Toshiba continues to work closely with the cloud companies to understand their exact capacity and performance requirements, and the ability to utilize our next-generation technologies will be key to meeting our customers' needs," said Raghu Gururangan, Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. Vice President, Engineering & Product Marketing. "Many years of close collaboration work with our key component suppliers is leading to impactful technology breakthroughs to achieve higher capacities, which ultimately reduces TCO (total cost of ownership) of our Nearline HDDs."

Managing massive datasets is excessively complex and costly. Today, Seagate Technology Holdings plc, a world leader in mass-data storage infrastructure solutions, announced the new Exos Application Platform (AP) with a new controller featuring 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors. The efficient, scalable, affordable end-to-end compute and storage platform delivers integrated compute and storage in a single enclosure optimizing rack space utilization, power efficiency, heat dissipation, and storage density.

The need for advanced storage solutions continues to rise to unprecedented levels with the ever-increasing growth in data generation. According to a report commissioned by Seagate and conducted by the research firm IDC, Rethink Data, enterprise data is expected to grow at an average rate of 42.2% over the next two years. The survey, which was conducted by IDC, also found that only 32% of data available to enterprises is put to work. The remaining 68% is unleveraged.

OWC, the premier zero-emissions Mac and PC technology company, and a respected provider of Memory, External Drives, SSDs, Mac & PC Docking Solutions, Network Attached Storage, and Performance Upgrade Kits, today announces the all-new OWC Accelsior 8M2. The OWC Accelsior 8M2 brings impressive speed and storage capacity to 2019 Mac Pros, Windows or Linux computers, and PCIe expansion systems.

It utilizes the total bandwidth of the latest PCIe technology and has a highly efficient heat dissipating design to provide ultra-reliable speeds up to 26,000 MB/s. Creating the fastest PCIe SSD meant combining bold engineering with the latest technology. Each OWC Accelsior 8M2's eight NVMe M.2 SSD slots can run at their full x4 lanes of data throughput. All that insanely fast speed through an entire PCIe 4.0 x16 lane architecture with up to 64 TB of storage.

Kingston FURY, the gaming division of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., a world leader in memory products and technology solutions, today announced Kingston FURY Renegade SSD, its next generation PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 drive for gamers, enthusiasts, and high-power users. Kingston FURY Renegade SSD delivers cutting-edge performance in high capacities using the latest Gen 4x4 controller and 3D TLC NAND.

By maximizing the available bandwidth of PCIe 4.0, Kingston FURY Renegade SSD achieves speeds up to 7,300/7,000 MB/s read/write and up to 1,000,000 IOPS to deliver amazing consistency for an exceptional gaming experience. The drive is optimized to reduce game and application load times, stream and capture with ease and give your system an overall boost in responsiveness. Available in high capacities up to 4 TB, users can store an extensive library of their favorite games and media and still have space for the latest titles. In addition to formidable speeds and massive capacity options, Kingston FURY Renegade SSD combines a slim M.2 form factor and an advanced low profile, graphene aluminium heatspreader to keep your drive cool during intense usage and bring superior performance to the tightest of spaces in gaming PC's and laptops.

TerraMaster, a professional brand that specializes in providing innovative storage products for home, businesses and enterprises,presents the high-end and compact D16 Thunderbolt 3 tower storage solution for smooth DIT workflow. The standard for quality content rises each year as technology pushing innovation for high-definition audio and visual experiences. Today, 4K and 8K videos are in demand with more and more users capable of enjoying such high-definition content with modern displays. However, producing 4K and 8K content can be very taxing to content creators.

Ultra-high-definition such as 4K and 8K videos accumulate vast amounts of data storage. The speed requirement of uncompressed 4K video images can exceed 300 MB/s. Certain scenes a require higher frame rate, and the data volume may reach 1.5 GB/s. While for 8K video, the speed requirement and data volume are exponentially increased.

FUJIFILM Recording Media U.S.A., Inc. is pleased to announce the launch and availability of its FUJIFILM LTO Ultrium 9 Data Cartridge (LTO-9). Fujifilm's LTO-9 complies with the ninth generation LTO Ultrium standards for magnetic tape storage media, marking a new standard of performance for backing up and archiving large volumes of data. Fujifilm's LTO-9 uses proprietary technology to offer up to 45 TB of storage capacity (18 TB for non-compressed data), a 50% increase from the previous generation of LTO tape.

Magnetic tape is increasingly recognized as an ideal storage media for long term archival of high-volume data, safely at low-cost. In addition, tape has a significantly lower environmental impact as there is no need to have it constantly powered-on during data storage, thereby reducing CO2 emissions generated during its lifecycle by 95% when compared to hard disk drives (HDDs).

CORSAIR, a world leader in enthusiast components for gamers, creators, and PC builders, today announced the launch of a new Gen4 PCIe x4 NVMe M.2 Solid State Drive - the MP600 PRO XT. Available in capacities up to an immense 4 TB, the MP600 PRO XT stores massive amounts of data in a convenient form-factor that neatly fits nearly any PC build. For those who need to run games, load applications, and transfer files at lighting speed, the MP600 PRO XT delivers incredible sustained performance with a pre-installed heatspreader, leaving standard M.2 SSDs in the dust.

The MP600 PRO XT boasts extreme performance paired with exceptional cooling and compatibility, breaking the 7,000 MB/sec barrier with up to 7,100 MB/sec sequential read and 6,800 MB/sec sequential write speeds (performance and endurance vary by capacity), as well as more than one million input/output operations per second (IOPS). The MP600 PRO XT is built with high-density 3D TLC NAND, delivering both great performance and endurance - up to 3,000 TB Written. Leading-edge PCIe Gen4 technology ensures that your drive achieves maximum bandwidth, and backward-compatibility with PCIe Gen3 gives you the versatility to bring fast storage to a host of systems (lower performance on PCIe Gen3).

ATP Electronics, a global leader in specialized storage and memory solutions, has announced that its A600Sc Series serial ATA solid state drives (SATA SSDs) have been successfully qualified for compatibility and interoperability with Adaptec Smart Storage PCIe Gen 4 Tri-Mode SmartRAID 3200, SmartHBA 2200, and HBA 1200 Smart Storage adapters.

Designed for storage platforms in next-generation data centers, the Adaptec PCIe Gen 4 SAS/SATA/NVMe HBA and RAID tri-mode adapters deliver significantly higher performance through PCIe Gen 4 x16 CPU interfaces as well as SAS and SATA storage. The new offerings simplify integration and provide flexibility to aggregate diverse storage devices with Microchip's proven security and manageability features for the most demanding server storage applications.

Worldwide revenues for the artificial intelligence (AI) market, including software, hardware, and services, is estimated to grow 15.2% year over year in 2021 to $341.8 billion, according to the latest release of the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Semiannual Artificial Intelligence Tracker. The market is forecast to accelerate further in 2022 with 18.8% growth and remain on track to break the $500 billion mark by 2024. Among the three technology categories, AI Software occupied 88% of the overall AI market. However, in terms of growth, AI Hardware is estimated to grow the fastest in the next several years. From 2023 onwards, AI Services is forecast to become the fastest growing category.

Within the AI Software category, AI Applications has the lion's share at nearly 50% of revenues. In terms of growth, AI Platforms is the strongest with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33.2%. The slowest will be AI System Infrastructure Software with a five-year CAGR of 14.4% while accounting for roughly 35% of all AI Software revenues. Within the AI Applications market, AI ERM is expected to grow slightly stronger than AI CRM over the next five years. Meanwhile, AI Lifecycle Software is forecast to grow the fastest among the markets within AI Platforms.

Seagate has confirmed that it now has a PS5-compatible SSD that should be a worthwhile drop-in replacement for the PS5's user-replaceable storage. This isn't a new product, mind you: the company has announced the Firecuda 530 for some time now. However, the company did announce that this SSD can be used in the PS5 system - even if just barely. With space being so constrained in the PS5's NVMe SSD slot, not all SSDs can even physically fit the available space (110 x 25 x 11.25 mm) - and especially not all SSDs featuring a heatsink, even if PS5's compatibility requirements demand such an heatsink to be present so as to avoid thermal throttling.

The FIrecuda 530 1 TB can easily best Sony's 5500 MB/s sequential read requirements for SSD compatibility with the PS5 - the PCIe 4.0 Firecuda 530 offers 7,300 MB/s on that regard, so it more than fits the part. The user-replaceable SSD storage on the PS5 will only be available for Beta users at first, via an upcoming software update for the console, and there are some hoops to jump through in migrating data to it. Seagate is also releasing a 2 TB version ($569.99) and a 4 TB version ($1,049.99). Seagate's own user-replaceable SSD for the Xbox Series X|S, the Storage Expansion Card, is available in 1 TB capacity for $219.

TerraMaster, a professional brand that specializes in providing innovative storage products for home, businesses and enterprises, proudly presents the D16 Thunderbolt 3 16-bay professional storage solution. The TerraMaster D16 Thunderbolt 3 is the world's most compact 16-bay tower storage. It uses the high-speed Thunderbolt 3 interface with up to 40 Gbps data transfer speed for fast and efficient 4K/8K video editing. It comes fitted with smart quiet fans for efficient and silent cooling that won't disrupt working professionals.

Designed for demanding professionals such as video editors, animators, CAD users, and other content creators, the D16 Thunderbolt 3 delivers more than just high-speed, high-capacity storage. It features support for different professional-grade RAID modes to suit your needs.It also comes in a black and silver aluminium chassis that will fit any modern workspace with efficient silent thermal design.

NVIDIA today announced it is turbocharging the NVIDIA HGX AI supercomputing platform with new technologies that fuse AI with high performance computing, making supercomputing more useful to a growing number of industries.

To accelerate the new era of industrial AI and HPC, NVIDIA has added three key technologies to its HGX platform: the NVIDIA A100 80 GB PCIe GPU, NVIDIA NDR 400G InfiniBand networking, and NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage software. Together, they provide the extreme performance to enable industrial HPC innovation.

Microsoft's ambitious DirectStorage API, which attempts to solve the storage bottleneck in games, facilitating faster game load times, has been walled off from Windows 10. To use it, games now require the new Windows 11 operating system, and a GPU that supports the DirectX 12 Ultimate API. This limits the GPU choices to NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 20-series, RTX 30-series, and AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series.

The other hardware requirement intrinsic to DirectStorage is for you to use an NVMe SSD that uses Microsoft's "Standard NVM Express Controller" driver that's included with Windows. Another hardware requirement that's baffling is that the SSD should be at least 1 TB in capacity. DirectStorage facilitates compressed game asset data to be transferred directly to the GPU from the storage device, and for it to be uncompressed by the GPU (using compute shaders), so there is a significant reduction in storage sub-system latency, and CPU utilization, impacting game load times.