Enterprise SSDs
At FMS 2024, Phison devoted significant booth space to their enterprise / datacenter SSD and PCIe retimer solutions, in addition to their consumer products. As a controller / silicon vendor, Phison had historically been working with drive partners to bring their solutions to the market. On the enterprise side, their tie-up with Seagate for the X1 series (and the subsequent Nytro-branded enterprise SSDs) is quite well-known. Seagate supplied the requirements list and had a say in the final firmware before qualifying the drives themselves for their datacenter customers. Such qualification involves a significant resource investment that is possible only by large companies (ruling out most of the tier-two consumer SSD vendors). Phison had demonstrated the Gen 5 X2 platform at last year's FMS as a...
Samsung Announces Standards-Compliant Key-Value SSD Prototype
Samsung has announced a new prototype key-value SSD that is compatible with the first industry standard API for key-value storage devices. Earlier this year, the Object Drives working group...
48 by Billy Tallis on 9/5/2019Toshiba's Timeline for PCIe 4.0 SSDs
Following up on several announcements from Flash Memory Summit earlier this month, Toshiba has shared more information about their plans for transitioning their NVMe SSDs to PCI Express 4.0...
10 by Billy Tallis on 8/30/2019FMS 2019: EDSFF Form Factors Update - Long, Short, & Everything In-Between
What began as Intel's Ruler concept for a new SSD form factor blossomed into the Enterprise and Datacenter Small Form Factor family of standards, with the version 1.0 specs...
1 by Billy Tallis on 8/16/2019Western Digital Reveals Ultrastar DC SN340 SSDs for Read Intensive Workloads
Western Digital has introduced its new accelerator drives designed for very read-intensive workloads. The key feature of the Ultrastar DC SN340 Very Read Intensive (VRI) SSDs is their low...
5 by Anton Shilov on 8/7/2019Western Digital Unveils Ultrastar DC SN640 SSDs: Up to 30.72 TB Capacity
Western Digital has announced its new family of enterprise SSDs aimed at mixed-use-case workloads. The new drives use in-house developed components and come in EDSFF E1.L, U.2, and M.2-22110...
14 by Anton Shilov on 8/7/2019Liqid to Demonstrate Element LQD4500 PCIe 4.0 x16 SSD: 32 TB At Up to 24 GB/s
Liqid, a maker of SSDs for mission critical and performance-hungry applications, plans to demonstrate one of the world’s first PCIe 4.0 x16 solid-state drives at Flash Memory Summit next...
24 by Anton Shilov on 8/2/2019Phison’s Next-Gen eSSD Controllers to Support Everspin’s STT-MRAM Caching
Phison and Everspin on Wednesday said that the former's upcoming controllers for enterprise-grade SSDs would natively support the latter’s spin torque transfer MRAM (STT-MRAM) that will be used...
20 by Anton Shilov on 7/25/2019The Kingston DC500 Series Enterprise SATA SSDs Review: Making a Name In a Commodity Market
SATA isn't dead yet. Kingston has kicked off a new generation of enterprise SSDs with a new family of SATA drives built around the new Phison S12DC controller and...
28 by Billy Tallis on 6/25/2019Silicon Motion’s SM8108: A Next-Gen Enterprise SSD Controller w/ Dual DRAM & 3D QLC Support
Having secured strong positions on the market for consumer SSDs, Silicon Motion is now after the enterprise SSD market. At Computex, the company demonstrated a prototype of an SSD...
7 by Anton Shilov on 6/24/2019SK Hynix Launches 2nd Gen Enterprise SSD: 72-Layer 3D NAND & In-House Controller
SK Hynix on Thursday introduced its 2nd generation enterprise-grade NVMe SSDs, which are based entirlely on the company's in-house SSD technology. The new drives offer 4 – 8 TB...
4 by Anton Shilov on 6/21/2019Intel Announces New Optane And QLC Enterprise SSDs
Slipped in to the briefings for Intel's mountain of announcements today are two new enterprise SSDs at opposite ends of the product line: a new Optane SSD and a...
27 by Billy Tallis on 4/2/2019Kingston Launches New Enterprise SATA SSDs
Kingston is making a renewed effort in the enterprise storage market this year, starting with the launch of their DC500 family of enterprise SATA SSDs. The new DC500R and...
8 by Billy Tallis on 3/18/2019The Reality of SSD Capacity: No-One Wants Over 16TB Per Drive
One of the expanding elements of the storage business is that the capacity per drive has been ever increasing. Spinning hard-disk drives are approaching 20 TB soon, while solid...
86 by Ian Cutress on 3/13/2019The Memblaze PBlaze5 C916 Enterprise SSD Review: High Performance and High Capacities
The Memblaze PBlaze5 high-end enterprise SSD product line has been refreshed with 64-layer 3D NAND, allowing for better power efficiency and more affordable top-tier performance. The PBlaze5 C916...
13 by Billy Tallis on 3/13/2019The Samsung 983 ZET (Z-NAND) SSD Review: How Fast Can Flash Memory Get?
Samsung's 983 ZET is a high-end enterprise SSD and the first retail drive to feature Samsung's low-latency SLC Z-NAND flash memory. Designed for highly performance-bound workloads that favor IOPS...
46 by Billy Tallis on 2/19/2019The Enterpise TLC Storage Era Begins: Rounding Up 13 SSDs With Samsung, Intel, and Memblaze
It's been a busy year for consumer SSDs. With all the NAND flash manufacturers now shipping high-quality 3D NAND in volume, we've seen more competition than ever, and huge...
36 by Billy Tallis on 1/3/2019Micron Announces Broad Availability Of 5210 ION QLC SSD
Micron's 5210 ION enterprise SATA SSD was announced in May as the first shipping SSD with four bit per cell (QLC) NAND flash memory, but until now it has...
13 by Billy Tallis on 11/8/2018Samsung Launches Broad Range Of Datacenter SSDs
Today Samsung is launching a new generation of datacenter SSD models that are intended for small and medium businesses and will be sold through online retailers. Most of the...
14 by Billy Tallis on 9/4/2018SSD Form Factors Proliferate At Flash Memory Summit 2018
Last year, Intel and Samsung proposed new form factors for enterprise/datacenter SSDs with the goal of overcoming the shortcomings of the existing M.2, U.2 and PCIe add-in card form...
26 by Billy Tallis on 8/17/2018IBM And Everspin Announce 19TB NVMe SSD With MRAM Write Cache
A new generation of IBM's FlashSystem storage appliances will be adopting a new architecture with magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM) write caches instead of capacitor-backed DRAM. MRAM is one of the...
15 by Billy Tallis on 8/6/2018