SSDs
When Western Digital introduced its Ultrastar DC SN861 SSDs earlier this year, the company did not disclose which controller it used for these drives, which made many observers presume that WD was using an in-house controller. But a recent teardown of the drive shows that is not the case; instead, the company is using a controller from Fadu, a South Korean company founded in 2015 that specializes on enterprise-grade turnkey SSD solutions. The Western Digital Ultrastar DC SN861 SSD is aimed at performance-hungry hyperscale datacenters and enterprise customers which are adopting PCIe Gen5 storage devices these days. And, as uncovered in photos from a recent Storage Review article, the drive is based on Fadu's FC5161 NVMe 2.0-compliant controller. The FC5161 utilizes 16 NAND channels supporting...
Micron acquires SSD Controller Designer Tidal Systems, Inc.
A year ago, several veterans of SSD controller design firms SandForce and Link_A_Media Devices formed a new startup called Tidal Systems, Inc. to focus on developing NVMe SSD controllers...
12 by Billy Tallis on 10/9/2015Intel Announces SSD DC P3608 Series
Intel is introducing a new family of enterprise PCIe SSDs with the aim of outperforming their existing DC P3600 series and even beating the DC P3700 series in many...
28 by Billy Tallis on 9/23/2015Samsung Details 3rd Gen V-NAND Rollout: 4TB 850 Pro, 1TB 850 EVO M.2, & More In 2016
Along with announcing the new 2nd generation V-NAND based 950 Pro SSD, Samsung also detailed some of their plans for the rollout of drives based on their recently announced...
23 by Ryan Smith & Billy Tallis on 9/22/2015Samsung Announces 950 Pro SSD, Their First Consumer V-NAND + NVMe SSD
We’re here at Samsung’s SSD Global Summit, the company’s annual SSD technology reveal. This event is typically held mid-summer, however with MERS concerns in South Korea this year, the...
49 by Ryan Smith & Billy Tallis on 9/22/2015Toshiba Announces Q300 And Q300 Pro Consumer SSDs
After all the enterprise and OEM drive announcements last month surrounding Flash Memory Summit, we've finally got a new drive to talk about that will be sold directly to...
30 by Billy Tallis on 9/4/2015Samsung SSD Update: 48-layer 256Gbit TLC 3D NAND & Three New TLC SSDs Announced
When Samsung took the stage at the 2015 Flash Memory Summit, they admittedly didn't deliver any bombshell announcements on the scale of the Intel/Micron 3D XPoint surprise, but they...
61 by Billy Tallis on 8/13/2015Toshiba Brings Through-Silicon Vias to NAND Flash
At Flash Memory Summit this week, Toshiba is showing off a NAND flash device packaged using through-silicon vias rather than traditional wire-bonded connections. The NAND flash currently on the market...
18 by Billy Tallis on 8/12/2015SanDisk Announces Second Generation CloudSpeed Ultra SATA Enterprise SSD
At Flash Memory Summit today SanDisk announced the second generation of their CloudSpeed Ultra enterprise drive. This is the sibling to the gen. 2 CloudSpeed Eco that was announced...
7 by Billy Tallis on 8/11/2015Seagate Introduces New Nytro PCIe SSDs: XP6500 & XF/XM1440
After acquiring SSD controller designer SandForce, LSI took the quick route towards creating high-performance PCIe SSDs by putting multiple SandForce controllers and an LSI RAID controller on a single...
20 by Billy Tallis on 8/11/2015Toshiba Announces Three New NVMe SSD Families
On the eve of Flash Memory Summit (August 11-13), Toshiba has announced a full range of NVMe-based PCIe SSDs using Toshiba controllers and Toshiba MLC flash. Toshiba NVMe Drive Families Drive...
17 by Billy Tallis on 8/11/2015Toshiba and SanDisk Announce 48-layer 256Gbit TLC 3D NAND
This week Toshiba and SanDisk are announcing a new milestone in their joint development of flash memory. Back in March Toshiba announced a 48-layer 3D NAND technology that they...
28 by Billy Tallis on 8/4/2015Seagate and Micron Announce 1200.2, S600DC SAS SSD Families for Enterprise
Today Seagate and Micron are jointly announcing their latest generation of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) MLC SSDs for enterprise use. The new families of drives are designed to significantly...
15 by Billy Tallis on 8/4/2015The 2TB Samsung 850 Pro & EVO SSD Review
For the past two years, client SSD capacities have been stumbling at 1TB. The cost of NAND is still too high to make terabyte drives a mainstream capacity, but...
66 by Kristian Vättö on 7/23/2015Micron M510DC (480GB) Enterprise SATA SSD Review
Most data center workloads tend to be read-intensive. It's only recently that SSDs have started to offer pricing low enough to replace hard drives in read workoads and a...
22 by Kristian Vättö on 7/21/2015Samsung Releases PM863 & SM863 Enterprise SATA SSDs: Up to 3.84TB with 3D V-NAND
At CES, Samsung displayed a variety of new SSD solutions, including PM863 and SM863, the company's new SATA 6Gbps enterprise drives. At the time Samsung was only sampling its...
37 by Kristian Vättö on 7/20/2015ADATA XPG SX930 (120GB, 240GB & 480GB) SSD Review: JMicron JMF670H Debuts
At Computex ADATA had a variety of new SSDs on display. While most were based on upcoming technologies such as TLC NAND and the PCIe/NVMe interface, the company also...
67 by Kristian Vättö on 7/16/2015Interview with Kevin Chen, ADATA's Vice President of SSD Marketing
Last year at Computex I had the opportunity to interview ADATA’s President Shalley Chen. At the time, we discussed the SSD and DRAM industries in general as well as...
6 by Kristian Vättö on 7/15/2015OCZ Trion 100 (240GB, 480GB & 960GB) SSD Review: Bringing Toshiba to the Retail
It's been a year and a half since OCZ went bankrupt and Toshiba acquired its assets. In this time we have seen OCZ transition all of its products to...
65 by Kristian Vättö on 7/9/2015Samsung Launches New 2TB SSD 850 EVO And 850 PRO Models
Due to what Samsung is citing as a surge in demand for larger capacity SSDs, they have now launched two new models offering up to two terabytes of storage...
57 by Brett Howse on 7/7/2015Samsung SM951-NVMe (256GB) PCIe SSD Review
Samsung has always been an early adopter in the SSD space. The company was the first one on the market with a PCIe 2.0 x4 M.2 SSD the (XP941...
74 by Kristian Vättö on 6/25/2015