The CXL consortium has had a regular presence at FMS (which rechristened itself from 'Flash Memory Summit' to the 'Future of Memory and Storage' this year). Back at FMS 2022, the company had announced v3.0 of the CXL specifications. This was followed by CXL 3.1's introduction at Supercomputing 2023. Having started off as a host to device interconnect standard, it had slowly subsumed other competing standards such as OpenCAPI and Gen-Z. As a result, the specifications started to encompass a wide variety of use-cases by building a protocol on top of the the ubiquitous PCIe expansion bus. The CXL consortium comprises of heavyweights such as AMD and Intel, as well as a large number of startup companies attempting to play in different segments on the device side. At FMS 2024, CXL had a prime position in the booth demos of many vendors.

The migration of server platforms from DDR4 to DDR5, along with the rise of workloads demanding large RAM capacity (but not particularly sensitive to either memory bandwidth or latency), has opened up memory expansion modules as one of the first set of widely available CXL devices. Over the last couple of years, we have had product announcements from Samsung and Micron in this area.

SK hynix CMM-DDR5 CXL Memory Module and HMSDK

At FMS 2024, SK hynix was showing off their DDR5-based CMM-DDR5 CXL memory module with a 128 GB capacity. The company was also detailing their associated Heterogeneous Memory Software Development Kit (HMSDK) - a set of libraries and tools at both the kernel and user levels aimed at increasing the ease of use of CXL memory. This is achieved in part by considering the memory pyramid / hierarchy and relocating the data between the server's main memory (DRAM) and the CXL device based on usage frequency.

The CMM-DDR5 CXL memory module comes in the SDFF form-factor (E3.S 2T) with a PCIe 3.0 x8 host interface. The internal memory is based on 1α technology DRAM, and the device promises DDR5-class bandwidth and latency within a single NUMA hop. As these memory modules are meant to be used in datacenters and enterprises, the firmware includes features for RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability) along with secure boot and other management features.

SK hynix was also demonstrating Niagara 2.0 - a hardware solution (currently based on FPGAs) to enable memory pooling and sharing - i.e, connecting multiple CXL memories to allow different hosts (CPUs and GPUs) to optimally share their capacity. The previous version only allowed capacity sharing, but the latest version enables sharing of data also. SK hynix had presented these solutions at the CXL DevCon 2024 earlier this year, but some progress seems to have been made in finalizing the specifications of the CMM-DDR5 at FMS 2024.

Microchip and Micron Demonstrate CZ120 CXL Memory Expansion Module

Micron had unveiled the CZ120 CXL Memory Expansion Module last year based on the Microchip SMC 2000 series CXL memory controller. At FMS 2024, Micron and Microchip had a demonstration of the module on a Granite Rapids server.

Additional insights into the SMC 2000 controller were also provided.

The CXL memory controller also incorporates DRAM die failure handling, and Microchip also provides diagnostics and debug tools to analyze failed modules. The memory controller also supports ECC, which forms part of the enterprise class RAS feature set of the SMC 2000 series. Its flexibility ensures that SMC 2000-based CXL memory modules using DDR4 can complement the main DDR5 DRAM in servers that support only the latter.

Marvell Announces Structera CXL Product Line

A few days prior to the start of FMS 2024, Marvell had announced a new CXL product line under the Structera tag. At FMS 2024, we had a chance to discuss this new line with Marvell and gather some additional insights.

Unlike other CXL device solutions focusing on memory pooling and expansion, the Structera product line also incorporates a compute accelerator part in addition to a memory-expansion controller. All of these are built on TSMC's 5nm technology.

The compute accelerator part, the Structera A 2504 (A for Accelerator) is a PCIe 5.0 x16 CXL 2.0 device with 16 integrated Arm Neoverse V2 (Demeter) cores at 3.2 GHz. It incorporates four DDR5-6400 channels with support for up to two DIMMs per channel along with in-line compression and decompression. The integration of powerful server-class ARM CPU cores means that the CXL memory expansion part scales the memory bandwidth available per core, while also scaling the compute capabilities.

Applications such as Deep-Learning Recommendation Models (DLRM) can benefit from the compute capability available in the CXL device. The scaling in the bandwidth availability is also accompanied by reduced energy consumption for the workload. The approach also contributed towards disaggregation within the server for a better thermal design as a whole.

The Structera X 2404 (X for eXpander) will be available either as a PCIe 5.0 (single x16 or two x8) device with four DDR4-3200 channels (up to 3 DIMMs per channel). Features such as in-line (de)compression, encryption / decryption, and secure boot with hardware support are present in the Structera X 2404 as well. Compared to the 100 W TDP of the Structera X 2404, Marvell expects this part to consume around 30 W. The primary purpose of this part is to enable hyperscalers to recycle DDR4 DIMMs (up to 6 TB per expander) while increasing server memory capacity.

Marvell also has a Structera X 2504 part that supports four DDR5-6400 channels (with two DIMMs per channel for up to 4 TB per expander). Other aspects remain the same as that of the DDR4-recycling part.

The company stressed upon some unique aspects of the Structera product line - the inline compression optimizes available DRAM capacity, and the 3 DIMMs per channel support for the DDR4 expander maximizes the amount of DRAM per expander (compared to competing solutions). The 5nm process lowers the power consumption, and the parts support accesses from multiple hosts. The integration of Arm Neoverse V2 cores appears to be a first for a CXL accelerator, and enables delegation of compute tasks to improve overall performance of the system.

While Marvell announced specifications for the Structera parts, it does appear that sampling is at least a few quarters away. One of the interesting aspects about Marvell's roadmaps / announcements in recent years has been their focus on creating products tuned to the demands of high-volume customers. The Structera product line is no different - hyperscalers are hungry to recycle their DDR4 memory modules and apparently can't wait to get their hands on the expander parts.

CXL is just starting its slow ramp-up, and the hockey stick segment of the growth curve is definitely definitely not in the near term. However, as more host systems with CXL support start to get deployed, products like the Structera accelerator line start to make sense from a server efficiency viewpoint.

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 an ONFi 5.0 2400 MT/s interface, and features a combination of enterprise-grade capabilities (OCP Cloud Spec 2.0, SR-IOV, up to 512 name spaces for ZNS support, flexible data placement, NVMe-MI 1.2, advanced security, telemetry, power loss protection) not available on other off-the-shelf controllers – or on any previous Western Digital controllers.  

The Ultrastar DC SN861 SSD offers sequential read speeds up to 13.7 GB/s as well as sequential write speeds up to 7.5 GB/s. As for random performance, it boasts with an up to 3.3 million random 4K read IOPS and up to 0.8 million random 4K write IOPS. The drives are available in capacities between 1.6 TB and 7.68 TB with one or three drive writes per day (DWPD) over five years rating as well as in U.2 and E1.S form-factors. 

While the two form factors of the SN861 share a similar technical design, Western Digital has tailored each version for distinct workloads: the E1.S supports FDP and performance enhancements specifically for cloud environments. By contrast, the U.2 model is geared towards high-performance enterprise tasks and emerging applications like AI.

Without any doubts, Western Digital's Ultrastar DC SN861 is a feature-rich high-performance enterprise-grade SSD. It has another distinctive feature: a 5W idle power consumption, which is rather low by the standards of enterprise-grade drives (e.g., it is 1W lower compared to the SN840). While the difference with predecessors may be just 1W, hyperscalers deploy thousands of drives and for their TCO every watt counts.

Western Digital's Ultrastar DC SN861 SSDs are now available for purchase to select customers (such as Meta) and to interested parties. Prices are unknown, but they will depend on such factors as volumes.

Sources: Fadu, Storage Review

As the deployment of PCIe 5.0 picks up steam in both datacenter and consumer markets, PCI-SIG is not sitting idle, and is already working on getting the ecosystem ready for the updats to the PCIe specifications. At FMS 2024, some vendors were even talking about PCIe 7.0 with its 128 GT/s capabilities despite PCIe 6.0 not even starting to ship yet. We caught up with PCI-SIG to get some updates on its activities and have a discussion on the current state of the PCIe ecosystem.

PCI-SIG has already made the PCIe 7.0 specifications (v 0.5) available to its members, and expects full specifications to be officially released sometime in 2025. The goal is to deliver a 128 GT/s data rate with up to 512 GBps of bidirectional traffic using x16 links. Similar to PCIe 6.0, this specification will also utilize PAM4 signaling and maintain backwards compatibility. Power efficiency as well as silicon die area are also being kept in mind as part of the drafting process.

The move to PAM4 signaling brings higher bit-error rates compared to the previous NRZ scheme. This made it necessary to adopt a different error correction scheme in PCIe 6.0 - instead of operating on variable length packets, PCIe 6.0's Flow Control Unit (FLIT) encoding operates on fixed size packets to aid in forward error correction. PCIe 7.0 retains these aspects.

The integrators list for the PCIe 6.0 compliance program is also expected to come out in 2025, though initial testing is already in progress. This was evident by the FMS 2024 demo involving Cadence's 3nm test chip for its PCIe 6.0 IP offering along with Teledyne Lecroy's PCIe 6.0 analyzer. These timelines track well with the specification completion dates and compliance program availability for previous PCIe generations.

We also received an update on the optical workgroup - while being optical-technology agnostic, the WG also intends to develop technology-specific form-factors including pluggable optical transceivers, on-board optics, co-packaged optics, and optical I/O. The logical and electrical layers of the PCIe 6.0 specifications are being enhanced to accommodate the new optical PCIe standardization and this process will also be done with PCIe 7.0 to coincide with that standard's release next year.

The PCI-SIG also has ongoing cabling initiatives. On the consumer side, we have seen significant traction for Thunderbolt and external GPU enclosures. However, even datacenters and enterprise systems are moving towards cabling solutions as it becomes evident that disaggregation of components such as storage from the CPU and GPU are better for thermal design. Additionally maintaining signal integrity over longer distances becomes difficult for on-board signal traces. Cabling internal to the computing systems can help here.

OCuLink emerged as a good candidate and was adopted fairly widely as an internal link in server systems. It has even made an appearance in mini-PCs from some Chinese manufacturers in its external avatar for the consumer market, albeit with limited traction. As speeds increase, a widely-adopted standard for external PCIe peripherals (or even connecting components within a system) will become imperative.

The growth in the enterprise SSD (eSSD) market has outpaced that of the client SSD market over the last few years. The requirements of AI servers for both training and inference has been the major impetus in this front. In addition to the usual vendors like Samsung, Solidigm, Micron, Kioxia, and Western Digital serving the cloud service providers (CSPs) and the likes of Facebook, a number of companies have been at work inside China to service the burgeoning eSSD market within.

In our coverage of the Microchip Flashtec 5016, we had noted Longsys's use of Microchip's SSD controllers to prepare and market enterprise SSDs under the FORESEE brand. Long before that, two companies - DapuStor and Memblaze - started releasing eSSDs specifically focusing on the Chinese market.

There are two drivers for the current growth spurt in the eSSD market. On the performance side, usage of eTLC behind a Gen 5 controller is allowing vendors to advertise significant benefits over the Gen 4 drives in the previous generation. At the same time, a capacity play is happening where there is a race to cram as much NAND as possible into a single U.2 / EDSFF enclosure. QLC is being used for this purpose, and we saw a number of such 128 TB-class eSSDs on display at FMS 2024.

DapuStor and Memblaze have both been relying on SSD controllers from Marvell for their flagship drives. Their latest product iterations for the Gen 5 era use the Marvell Bravera SC5 controller. Similar to the Flashtec controllers, these are not meant to be turnkey solutions. Rather, the SSD vendor has considerable flexibility in implementing specific features for their desired target market.

At FMS 2024, both DapuStor and Memblaze were displaying their latest solutions for the Gen 5 market. Memblaze was celebrating the sale of 150K+ units of their flagship Gen 5 solution - the PBlaze7 7940 incorporating Micron's 232L 3D eTLC with Marvell's Bravera SC5 controller. This SSD (available in capacities up to 30.72 TB) boasts of 14 GBps reads / 10 GBps writes along with random read / write performance of 2.8 M / 720K - all with a typical power consumption south of 16 W. Additionally, the support for some of NVMe features such as software-enabled flash (SEF) and zoned name space (ZNS) had helped Memblaze and Marvell to receive a 'Best of Show' award under the 'Most Innovative Customer Implementation' category.

DapuStor had their current lineup on display (including the Haishen H5000 series with the same Bravera SC5 controller). Additionally, the company had an unannounced proof-of-concept 61.44 TB QLC SSD on display. Despite the label carrying the Haishen5 series tag (its current members all use eTLC NAND), this sample comes with QLC flash.

DapuStor has already invested resources into implementing the flexible data placement (FDP) NVMe feature into the firmware of this QLC SSD. The company also had an interesting presentation session dealing with usage of CXL memory expansion to store the FTL for high-capacity enterprise SSDs - though this is something for the future and not related to any current product in the market.

Having established themselves within the Chinese market, both DapuStor and Memblaze are looking to expand in other markets. Having products with leading performance numbers and features in the eSSD growth segment will stand them in good stead in this endeavor.

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 continuation of the X1. However, with Seagate focusing on its HAMR ramp, and also fighting other battles, Phison decided to go ahead with the qualification process for the X2 process themselves. In the bigger scheme of things, Phison also realized that the white-labeling approach to enterprise SSDs was not going to work out in the long run. As a result, the Pascari brand was born (ostensibly to make Phison's enterprise SSDs more accessible to end consumers).

Under the Pascari brand, Phison has different lineups targeting different use-cases: from high-performance enterprise drives in the X series to boot drives in the B series. The AI series comes in variants supporting up to 100 DWPD (more on that in the aiDAPTIVE+ subsection below).

The D200V Gen 5 took pole position in the displayed drives, thanks to its leading 61.44 TB capacity point (a 122.88 TB drive is also being planned under the same line). The use of QLC in this capacity-focused line brings down the sustained sequential write speeds to 2.1 GBps, but these are meant for read-heavy workloads.

The X200, on the other hand, is a Gen 5 eTLC drive boasting up to 8.7 GBps sequential writes. It comes in read-centric (1 DWPD) and mixed workload variants (3 DWPD) in capacities up to 30.72 TB. The X100 eTLC drive is an evolution of the X1 / Seagate Nytro 5050 platform, albeit with newer NAND and larger capacities.

These drives come with all the usual enterprise features including power-loss protection, and FIPS certifiability. Though Phison didn't advertise this specifically, newer NVMe features like flexible data placement should become part of the firmware features in the future.

100 GBps with Dual HighPoint Rocket 1608 Cards and Phison E26 SSDs

Though not strictly an enterprise demo, Phison did have a station showing 100 GBps+ sequential reads and writes using a normal desktop workstation. The trick was installing two HighPoint Rocket 1608A add-in cards (each with eight M.2 slots) and placing the 16 M.2 drives in a RAID 0 configuration.

HighPoint Technology and Phison have been working together to qualify E26-based drives for this use-case, and we will be seeing more on this in a later review.

aiDAPTIV+ Pro Suite for AI Training

One of the more interesting demonstrations in Phison's booth was the aiDAPTIV+ Pro suite. At last year's FMS, Phison had demonstrated a 40 DWPD SSD for use with Chia (thankfully, that fad has faded). The company has been working on the extreme endurance aspect and moved it up to 60 DWPD (which is standard for the SLC-based cache drives from Micron and Solidigm).

At FMS 2024, the company took this SSD and added a middleware layer on top to ensure that workloads remain more sequential in nature. This drives up the endurance rating to 100 DWPD. Now, this middleware layer is actually part of their AI training suite targeting small business and medium enterprises who do not have the budget for a full-fledged DGX workstation, or for on-premises fine-tuning.

Re-training models by using these AI SSDs as an extension of the GPU VRAM can deliver significant TCO benefits for these companies, as the costly AI training-specific GPUs can be replaced with a set of relatively low-cost off-the-shelf RTX GPUs. This middleware comes with licensing aspects that are essentially tied to the purchase of the AI-series SSDs (that come with Gen 4 x4 interfaces currently in either U.2 or M.2 form-factors). The use of SSDs as a caching layer can enable fine-tuning of models with a very large number of parameters using a minimal number of GPUs (not having to use them primarily for their HBM capacity).

Samsung had quietly launched its BM1743 enterprise QLC SSD last month with a hefty 61.44 TB SKU. At FMS 2024, the company had the even larger 122.88 TB version of that SSD on display, alongside a few recorded benchmarking sessions. Compared to the previous generation, the BM1743 comes with a 4.1x improvement in I/O performance, improvement in data retention, and a 45% improvement in power efficiency for sequential writes.

The 128 TB-class QLC SSD boasts of sequential read speeds of 7.5 GBps and write speeds of 3 GBps. Random reads come in at 1.6 M IOPS, while 16 KB random writes clock in at 45K IOPS. Based on the quoted random write access granularity, it appears that Samsung is using a 16 KB indirection unit (IU) to optimize flash management. This is similar to the strategy adopted by Solidigm with IUs larger than 4K in their high-capacity SSDs.

A recorded benchmark session on the company's PM9D3a 8-channel Gen 5 SSD was also on display.

The SSD family is being promoted as a mainstream option for datacenters, and boasts of sequential reads up to 12 GBps and writes up to 6.8 GBps. Random reads clock in at 2 M IOPS, and random writes at 400 K IOPS.

Available in multiple form-factors up to 32 TB (M.2 tops out at 2 TB), the drive's firmware includes optional support for flexible data placement (FDP) to help address the write amplification aspect.

The PM1753 is the current enterprise SSD flagship in Samsung's lineup. With support for 16 NAND channels and capacities up to 32 TB, this U.2 / E3.S SSD has advertised sequential read and write speeds of 14.8 GBps and 11 GBps respectively. Random reads and writes for 4 KB accesses are listed at 3.4 M and 600 K IOPS.

Samsung claims a 1.7x performance improvement and a 1.7x power efficiency improvement over the previous generation (PM1743), making this TLC SSD suitable for AI servers.

The 9^th Gen. V-NAND wafer was also available for viewing, though photography was prohibited. Mass production of this flash memory began in April 2024.

A few years back, the Japanese government's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO ) allocated funding for the development of green datacenter technologies. With the aim to obtain up to 40% savings in overall power consumption, several Japanese companies have been developing an optical interface for their enterprise SSDs. And at this year's FMS, Kioxia had their optical interface on display.

For this demonstration, Kioxia took its existing CM7 enterprise SSD and created an optical interface for it. A PCIe card with on-board optics developed by Kyocera is installed in the server slot. An optical interface allows data transfer over long distances (it was 40m in the demo, but Kioxia promises lengths of up to 100m for the cable in the future). This allows the storage to be kept in a separate room with minimal cooling requirements compared to the rack with the CPUs and GPUs. Disaggregation of different server components will become an option as very high throughput interfaces such as PCIe 7.0 (with 128 GT/s rates) become available.

The demonstration of the optical SSD showed a slight loss in IOPS performance, but a significant advantage in the latency metric over the shipping enterprise SSD behind a copper network link. Obviously, there are advantages in wiring requirements and signal integrity maintenance with optical links.

Being a proof-of-concept demonstration, we do see the requirement for an industry-standard approach if this were to gain adoption among different datacenter vendors. The PCI-SIG optical workgroup will need to get its act together soon to create a standards-based approach to this problem.

At FMS 2024, the technological requirements from the storage and memory subsystem took center stage. Both SSD and controller vendors had various demonstrations touting their suitability for different stages of the AI data pipeline - ingestion, preparation, training, checkpointing, and inference. Vendors like Solidigm have different types of SSDs optimized for different stages of the pipeline. At the same time, controller vendors have taken advantage of one of the features introduced recently in the NVM Express standard - Flexible Data Placement (FDP).

FDP involves the host providing information / hints about the areas where the controller could place the incoming write data in order to reduce the write amplification. These hints are generated based on specific block sizes advertised by the device. The feature is completely backwards-compatible, with non-FDP hosts working just as before with FDP-enabled SSDs, and vice-versa.

Silicon Motion's MonTitan Gen 5 Enterprise SSD Platform was announced back in 2022. Since then, Silicon Motion has been touting the flexibility of the platform, allowing its customers to incorporate their own features as part of the customization process. This approach is common in the enterprise space, as we have seen with Marvell's Bravera SC5 SSD controller in the DapuStor SSDs and Microchip's Flashtec controllers in the Longsys FORESEE enterprise SSDs.

At FMS 2024, the company was demonstrating the advantages of flexible data placement by allowing a single QLC SSD based on their MonTitan platform to take part in different stages of the AI data pipeline while maintaining the required quality of service (minimum bandwidth) for each process. The company even has a trademarked name (PerformaShape) for the firmware feature in the controller that allows the isolation of different concurrent SSD accesses (from different stages in the AI data pipeline) to guarantee this QoS. Silicon Motion claims that this scheme will enable its customers to get the maximum write performance possible from QLC SSDs without negatively impacting the performance of other types of accesses.

Silicon Motion and Phison have market leadership in the client SSD controller market with similar approaches. However, their enterprise SSD controller marketing couldn't be more different. While Phison has gone in for a turnkey solution with their Gen 5 SSD platform (to the extent of not adopting the white label route for this generation, and instead opting to get the SSDs qualified with different cloud service providers themselves), Silicon Motion is opting for a different approach. The flexibility and customization possibilities can make platforms like the MonTitan appeal to flash array vendors.

At FMS 2024, Kioxia had a proof-of-concept demonstration of their proposed a new RAID offload methodology for enterprise SSDs. The impetus for this is quite clear: as SSDs get faster in each generation, RAID arrays have a major problem of maintaining (and scaling up) performance. Even in cases where the RAID operations are handled by a dedicated RAID card, a simple write request in, say, a RAID 5 array would involve two reads and two writes to different drives. In cases where there is no hardware acceleration, the data from the reads needs to travel all the way back to the CPU and main memory for further processing before the writes can be done.

Kioxia has proposed the use of the PCIe direct memory access feature along with the SSD controller's controller memory buffer (CMB) to avoid the movement of data up to the CPU and back. The required parity computation is done by an accelerator block resident within the SSD controller.

In Kioxia's PoC implementation, the DMA engine can access the entire host address space (including the peer SSD's BAR-mapped CMB), allowing it to receive and transfer data as required from neighboring SSDs on the bus. Kioxia noted that their offload PoC saw close to 50% reduction in CPU utilization and upwards of 90% reduction in system DRAM utilization compared to software RAID done on the CPU. The proposed offload scheme can also handle scrubbing operations without taking up the host CPU cycles for the parity computation task.

Kioxia has already taken steps to contribute these features to the NVM Express working group. If accepted, the proposed offload scheme will be part of a standard that could become widely available across multiple SSD vendors.

Western Digital's BiCS8 218-layer 3D NAND is being put to good use in a wide range of client and enterprise platforms, including WD's upcoming Gen 5 client SSDs and 128 TB-class datacenter SSD. On the external storage front, the company demonstrated four different products: for card-based media, 4 TB microSDUC and 8 TB SDUC cards with UHS-I speeds, and on the portable SSD front we had two 16 TB drives. One will be a SanDisk Desk Drive with external power, and the other in the SanDisk Extreme Pro housing with a lanyard opening in the case.

All of these are using BiCS8 QLC NAND, though I did hear booth talk (as I was taking leave) that they were not supposed to divulge the use of QLC in these products. The 4 TB microSDUC and 8 TB SDUC cards are rated for UHS-I speeds. They are being marketed under the SanDisk Ultra branding.

The SanDisk Desk Drive is an external SSD with a 18W power adapter, and it has been in the market for a few months now. Initially launched in capacities up to 8 TB, Western Digital had promised a 16 TB version before the end of the year. It appears that the product is coming to retail quite soon. One aspect to note is that this drive has been using TLC for the SKUs that are currently in the market, so it appears unlikely that the 16 TB version would be QLC. The units (at least up to the 8 TB capacity point) come with two SN850XE drives. Given the recent introduction of the 8 TB SN850X, an 'E' version with tweaked firmware is likely to be present in the 16 TB Desk Drive.

The 16 TB portable SSD in the SanDisk Extreme housing was a technology demonstration. It is definitely the highest capacity bus-powered portable SSD demonstrated by any vendor at any trade show thus far. Given the 16 TB Desk Drive's imminent market introduction, it is just a matter of time before the technology demonstration of the bus-powered version becomes a retail reality.

Kioxia's booth at FMS 2024 was a busy one with multiple technology demonstrations keeping visitors occupied. A walk-through of the BiCS 8 manufacturing process was the first to grab my attention. Kioxia and Western Digital announced the sampling of BiCS 8 in March 2023. We had touched briefly upon its CMOS Bonded Array (CBA) scheme in our coverage of Kioxial's 2Tb QLC NAND device and coverage of Western Digital's 128 TB QLC enterprise SSD proof-of-concept demonstration. At Kioxia's booth, we got more insights.

Traditionally, fabrication of flash chips involved placement of the associate logic circuitry (CMOS process) around the periphery of the flash array. The process then moved on to putting the CMOS under the cell array, but the wafer development process was serialized with the CMOS logic getting fabricated first followed by the cell array on top. However, this has some challenges because the cell array requires a high-temperature processing step to ensure higher reliability that can be detrimental to the health of the CMOS logic. Thanks to recent advancements in wafer bonding techniques, the new CBA process allows the CMOS wafer and cell array wafer to be processed independently in parallel and then pieced together, as shown in the models above.

The BiCS 8 3D NAND incorporates 218 layers, compared to 112 layers in BiCS 5 and 162 layers in BiCS 6. The company decided to skip over BiCS 7 (or, rather, it was probably a short-lived generation meant as an internal test vehicle). The generation retains the four-plane charge trap structure of BiCS 6. In its TLC avatar, it is available as a 1 Tbit device. The QLC version is available in two capacities - 1 Tbit and 2 Tbit.

Kioxia also noted that while the number of layers (218) doesn't compare favorably with the latest layer counts from the competition, its lateral scaling / cell shrinkage has enabled it to be competitive in terms of bit density as well as operating speeds (3200 MT/s). For reference, the latest shipping NAND from Micron - the G9 - has 276 layers with a bit density in TLC mode of 21 Gbit/mm², and operates at up to 3600 MT/s. However, its 232L NAND operates only up to 2400 MT/s and has a bit density of 14.6 Gbit/mm².

It must be noted that the CBA hybrid bonding process has advantages over the current processes used by other vendors - including Micron's CMOS under array (CuA) and SK hynix's 4D PUC (periphery-under-chip) developed in the late 2010s. It is expected that other NAND vendors will also move eventually to some variant of the hybrid bonding scheme used by Kioxia.

At FMS 2024, Phison gave us the usual updates on their client flash solutions. The E31T Gen 5 mainstream controller has already been seen at a few tradeshows starting with Computex 2023, while the USB4 native flash controller for high-end PSSDs was unveiled at CES 2024. The new solution being demonstrated was the E29T Gen 4 mainstream DRAM-less controller. Phison believes that there is still performance to be eked out on the Gen 4 platform with a low-cost DRAM-less solution.

Phison NVMe SSD Controller Comparison
	E31T	E29T	E27T	E26	E18
Market Segment	Mainstream Consumer			High-End Consumer
Manufacturing Process	7nm	12nm	12nm	12nm	12nm
CPU Cores	2x Cortex R5	1x Cortex R5	1x Cortex R5	2x Cortex R5	3x Cortex R5
Error Correction	7th Gen LDPC	7th Gen LDPC	5th Gen LDPC	5th Gen LDPC	4th Gen LDPC
DRAM	No	No	No	DDR4, LPDDR4	DDR4
Host Interface	PCIe 5.0 x4	PCIe 4.0 x4	PCIe 4.0 x4	PCIe 5.0 x4	PCIe 4.0 x4
NVMe Version	NVMe 2.0	NVMe 2.0	NVMe 2.0	NVMe 2.0	NVMe 1.4
NAND Channels, Interface Speed	4 ch, 3600 MT/s	4 ch, 3600 MT/s	4 ch, 3600 MT/s	8 ch, 2400 MT/s	8 ch, 1600 MT/s
Max Capacity	8 TB	8 TB	8 TB	8 TB	8 TB
Sequential Read	10.8 GB/s	7.4 GB/s	7.4 GB/s	14 GB/s	7.4 GB/s
Sequential Write	10.8 GB/s	6.5 GB/s	6.7 GB/s	11.8 GB/s	7.0 GB/s
4KB Random Read IOPS	1500k	1200k	1200k	1500k	1000k
4KB Random Write IOPS	1500k	1200k	1200k	2000k	1000k

Compared to the E27T, the key update is the use of a newer LDPC engine that enables better SSD lifespan as well as compatibility with the latest QLC flash, along with additional power optimizations.

The company also had a U21 USB4 PSSD reference design (complete with a MagSafe-compatible casing) on display, along with the usual CrystalDiskMark benchmark results. We were given to understand that PSSDs based on the U21 controller are very close to shipping into retail.

Phison has been known for taking the lead in introducing SSD controllers based on the latest and greatest interface options - be it PCIe 4.0, PCIe 5.0, or USB4. The competition is usually in the form of tier-one vendors opting for their in-house solution, or Silicon Motion stepping in a few quarters down the line after the market takes off with a more power-efficient solution. With the E29T, Phison is aiming to ensure that they still have a viable play in the mainstream Gen 4 market with their latest LDPC engine and supporting the highest available NAND flash speeds.

Microchip recently announced the availability of their second PCIe Gen 5 enterprise SSD controller - the Flashtec 5016. Like the 4016, this is also a 16-channel controller, but there are some key updates:

• PCIe 5.0 lane organization: Operation in x4 or dual independent x2 / x2 mode in the 5016, compared to the x8, or x4, or dual independent x4 / x2 mode in the 4016.
• DRAM support: Four ranks of DDR5-5200 in the 5016, compared to two ranks of DDR4-3200 in the 4016.
• Extended NAND support: 2400 MT/s NAND in the 4016, compared to the 3200 MT/s NAND support in the 5016.
• Performance improvements: The 5016 is capable of delivering 3.5M+ random read IOPS compared to the 3M+ of the 4016.

Microchip's enterprise SSD controllers provide a high level of flexibility to SSD vendors by providing them with significant horsepower and accelerators. The 5016 includes Cortex-A53 cores for SSD vendors to run custom applications relevant to SSD management. However, compared to the Gen4 controllers, there are two additional cores in the CPU cluster. The DRAM subsystem includes ECC support (both out-of-band and inline, as desired by the SSD vendor).

At FMS 2024, the company demonstrated an application of the neural network engines embedded in the Gen5 controllers. Controllers usually employ a 'read-retry' operation with altered read-out voltages for flash reads that do not complete successfully. Microchip implemented a machine learning approach to determine the read-out voltage based on the health history of the NAND block using the NN engines in the controller. This approach delivers tangible benefits for read latency and power consumption (thanks to a smaller number of errors on the first read).

The 4016 and 5016 come with a single-chip root of trust implementation for hardware security. A secure boot process with dual-signature authentication ensures that the controller firmware is not maliciously altered in the field. The company also brought out the advantages of their controller's implementation of SR-IOV, flexible data placement, and zoned namespaces along with their 'credit engine' scheme for multi-tenant cloud workloads. These aspects were also brought out in other demonstrations.

Microchip's press release included quotes from the usual NAND vendors - Solidigm, Kioxia, and Micron. On the customer front, Longsys has been using Flashtec controllers in their enterprise offerings along with YMTC NAND. It is likely that this collaboration will continue further using the new 5016 controller.

Western Digital's FMS 2024 demonstrations included a preview of their upcoming PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 2280 NVMe SSDs for mobile workstations and consumer desktops. The Gen 5 client SSD market has been dominated by solutions based on Phison's E26 controller. The first generation products launched with slower NAND flash, while the more recent ones have exceeded the 14 GBps barrier by utilizing Micron's 2400 MT/s 232L 3D TLC. Western Digital has been conservative over the last year or so by focusing more on the mainstream / mid-range market in terms of new product introductions (such as the WD Blue SN5000, WD_BLACK SN770M, and the WD Blue SN580). Their SSD lineup is due for an update with Gen 5 drives being sorely missed. The SSDs being demonstrated at FMS 2024 will end up doing just that.

Western Digital's technology demonstrations in this segment involved two different M.2 2280 SSDs - one for the performance segment, and another for the mainstream market. They both utilize in-house controllers - while the performance segment drive uses a 8-channel controller with DRAM for the flash translation layer, the mainstream one utilizes a 4-channel DRAM-less controller. Both drives being benchmarked live were equipped with BiCS8 218-layer 3D TLC.

Western Digital is touting the power efficiency of their platform as a key differentiator, promising south of 7W (performance drive) and 5W (mainstream DRAM-less drive) for the complete SSD under stressful traffic. This makes it suitable for use in mobile workstations, but a good fit for desktops as well.

Demonstrated performance numbers indicate almost 15 GBps sequential reads and 2M+ random read IOPS for the performance drive, and 10.7 GBps sequential reads for the mainstream version. Western Digital might have missed the Gen 5 bus as it started out slowly. However, the technology demonstrations with the in-house controller and NAND indicate that WD has caught up just as the Gen 5 market is about to take off.|

Silicon Motion's SM2320 native USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 controller for USB flash drives and portable SSDs has enjoyed great market success with a large number of design wins over the last few years. Silicon Motion proudly displayed a selection of products based on the SM2320 on the show floor at FMS 2024.

The SM2320 went into mass production in Q3 2021. Since then, the NAND flash market has seen considerable change. QLC is becoming more and more reliable and common, leading to the launch of high-capacity cost-effective 4 TB and 8 TB SSDs. Newer NAND generations with flash operating at higher speeds have also made an appearance.

The SM2320, fabricated in TSMC's 28nm node, supported four channels of NAND flash running at up to 800 MT/s. The new SM2322 uses the same process node and retains support for the same number of flash channels and chip enables (8 CEs per channel). However, the NAND can now operate at up to 1200 MT/s.

The SM2322 also improves the QLC support, thanks to the implementation of a better ECC scheme. While the SM2320 opted for a 2KB LDPC implementation, the SM2322 goes in for a 4KB LDPC solution. The use of a larger region enables extension of the NAND's useful life.

The SM2322 and SM2320 packages are similar in size, and Silicon Motion expects PSSD designs using the SM2320 to adopt the SM2322 with different NAND (higher capacity / speeds) using the same enclosure. Products based on the SM2322 are expected to appear in the market before the end of the year.

Silicon Motion has been teasing their SM2508 client SSD controller for more than a year now at various trade shows. The controller is finally set for mass production, just in time as the mainstream segment of the Gen 5 SSD market is poised to take off. Silicon Motion expects SSDs based on the SM2508 to be available for purchase by the end of the year.

At FMS 2024, the company was reusing the same information cards seen at Computex in June. The specifications of the SM2508 from our Computex coverage are reproduced here.

Silicon Motion NVMe Client SSD Controller Comparison
	SM2508	SM2264	SM2268XT2	SM2269XT
Market Segment	High-End		Mainstream
Manufacturing Process	6nm	12nm	12nm	12nm
CPU Cores	4x Cortex R8	4x Cortex R8	2x Cortex R8	2x Cortex R8
Error Correction	4K+ LDPC	4K LDPC	4K+ LDPC	4K LDPC
DRAM	DDR4, LPDDR4X	DDR4, LPDDR4X	No	No
Host Interface	PCIe 5.0 x4	PCIe 4.0 x4	PCIe 4.0 x4	PCIe 4.0 x4
NVMe Version	NVMe 2.0	NVMe 1.4	NVMe 2.0	NVMe 1.4
NAND Channels, Interface Speed	8 ch, 3600 MT/s	8 ch, 1600 MT/s	4 ch, 3600 MT/s	4 ch, 1600 MT/s
Sequential Read	14.5 GB/s	7.5 GB/s	7.4 GB/s	5.1 GB/s
Sequential Write	14 GB/s	7 GB/s	6.7 GB/s	4.8 GB/s
4KB Random Read IOPS	2500k	1300k	1200k	900k
4KB Random Write IOPS	2500k	1200k	1200k	900k

Current Gen 5 SSDs in the consumer client market are currently all based on Phison's E26 controller. The appearance of newer platform solutions for SSD vendors is bound to be good from both an end-user pricing and adoption perspective.

Solidigm's D5-P5336 61.44 TB enterprise QLC SSD released in mid-2023 has seen unprecedented demand over the last few quarters, driven by the insatiable demand for high-capacity storage in AI datacenters. Multiple vendors have recognized and started preparing products to service this demand, but Solidigm appears to have taken the lead in actual market availability.

At FMS 2024, Solidigm previewed a U.2 version of their upcoming 122 TB enterprise QLC SSD. The proof-of-concept Gen 4 drives were running live in a 2U server, and Solidigm is preparing them for an early 2025 release.

Given the capacity play, Solidigm will be relying on QLC technology. However, the company was coy about confirming the NAND generation used in the product.

Source: The Advantages of Floating Gate Technology (YouTube)

The 61.44 TB D5-P5336 currently utilizes Solidigm's 192L 3D QLC based on the floating gate architecture. This has a distinct advantage for QLC endurance compared to the charge trap architecture also available to Solidigm from SK hynix. That said, SK hynix's 238L NAND also has a QLC avatar, which gives Solidigm the flexibility to use either NAND for the production version of the 122 TB drive. Solidigm expects to confirm this by the end of year in preparation for volume shipment in the first half of 2025.

1TB of fast storage in your pocket with SK hynix's Tube T31 drive for just $69.

© Future

In an unexpected announcement during their quarterly earnings call this week, Western Digital revealed that it has begun sampling an upcoming 32TB hard drive. The nearline HDD is aimed at hyperscalers, and relies on a combination of Westen Digital's EAMR technology, as well as shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology to hit their highest capacity figures to date.

Western Digital's 32TB HDD uses all of the company's most advanced technologies. Besides energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR/ePMR 2 to be more precise) technology, WD is also leveraging triple-stage actuators for better positioning of heads and two-dimensional (TDMR) read heads, OptiNAND for extra performance and reliability, distributed sector (DSEC) technology and a proprietary error correcting code (ECC) technology. And, most importantly, UltraSMR technology to provide additional capacity.

"We are shipping samples of our 32TB UltraSMR/ePMR nearline hard drives to select customers," said David Goeckeler, chief executive of Western Digital, at the earnings call. "These drives feature advanced triple-stage actuators and OptiNAND technology which are designed for seamless qualification, integration and deployment in hyperscale cloud and enterprise data centers while maintaining exceptional reliability."

Seagate is currently shipping its 30TB Exos HDDs based on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) platform called Modaic 3+ to select exascalers, and the company has implied that it can build a 32TB version of the drive using SMR. Therefore, from capacity point of view, Western Digital's announcement means that the company has caught up with its rival.

As with the comapny's other UltraSMR drives, the 32TB nearline drive is aimed at WD's enterprise customers, whose infrastructure can handle the additional management requirements that SMR imposes. As SMR in enterprise drives is not transparent, it's up to the host to manage many of the complexities that come with a hard drive that isn't suited for random writes. Though at least in WD's case, the upshot is that UltraSMR also offers a more significant density increase than other SMR implementations, using a larger number of SMR bands to increase HDD capacity by up to 20%.

Working backwards, that 20% capacity increase also means that WD's new drive is starting from 2.56TB CMR platters. And while 2.56TB makes for a very decent areal density, this would mean that WD is still behind rival Seagate in terms of areal density overall, as Seagate has 3TB CMR platters in its latest HAMR-based Exos drives.

Hand-held gaming consoles based on notebook platforms (such as the Valve SteamDeck, ASUS ROG Ally, and the MSI Claw) are one of the fastest growing segments in the PC gaming market. The form-factor of such systems has created a demand for M.2 2230 NVMe SSDs. Almost all vendors have a play in this market, and even Micron has OEM SSDs (such as the Micron 2400, 2550, and 2500 series) in this form-factor. Crucial has strangely not had an offering with its own brand name to target this segment, but that changes today with the launch of the Crucial P310 NVMe SSD.

The Crucial P310 is a family of M.2 2230 PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSDs boasting class-leading read/write speeds of 7.1 GBps and 6 GBps. The family currently has two capacity points - 1 TB and 2 TB. Micron claims that the use of its 232L 3D NAND and Phison's latest E27T DRAM-less controller (fabricated in TSMC's 12nm process) help in reducing power consumption under active use compared to the competition - directly translating to better battery life for the primary use-case involving gaming handheld consoles.

Based on the specifications, it appears that the drives are using 232L 3D QLC. Compared to the recently-released Micron 2550 SSD series in the same form-factor, a swap in the controller has enabled some improvements in both power efficiency and performance. The other specifications are summarized in the table below.

Crucial P310 SSD Specifications
Capacity	2 TB	1 TB
Controller	Phison E27T (DRAM-less)
NAND Flash	Micron 232L 3D QLC NAND
Form-Factor, Interface	Single-Sided M.2-2230 PCIe 4.0 x4, NVMe
Sequential Read	7100 MB/s
Sequential Write	6000 MB/s
Random Read IOPS	1 M
Random Write IOPS	1.2 M
SLC Caching	Yes
TCG Pyrite Encryption	Yes
Warranty	5 Years
Write Endurance	440 TBW 0.12 DWPD	220 TBW 0.12 DWPD
MSRP	$215	$115

The power efficiency, cost, and capacity points are plus points for the Crucial P310 family. However, the endurance ratings are quite low. Gaming workloads are inherently read-heavy, and this may not be a concern for the average consumer. However, a 0.12 DWPD rating may turn out to be a negative aspect when compared against the competition's 0.33 DWPD offerings in the same segment.

Western Digital has quietly introduced an 8 TB version of its high-end SN850X SSD, doubling the top capacity of the well-regarded drive family. The new drive offers performance on par with other members of the range, but with twice as much capacity as the previous top-end model – and with a sizable price premium to go with its newfound capacity.

Western Digital introduced its WD_Black SN850X SSDs in the summer of 2022, releasing single-sided 1 TB and 2 TB models, along with a double-sided 4 TB model. But now almost two years down the line, the company has seen it fit to introduce the even higher capacity 8 TB model to serve as their flagship PCIe 4.0 SSD, and keep with the times of NAND prices and SSD capacity demands.

Like the other SN850X models, WD is using their in-house, 8-channel controller for the new 8 TB model, which sports a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface. And being that this is a high-end SSD, the controller is paired with DRAM (DDR4) for page index caching, though WD doesn't disclose how much DRAM is on any given model. On the NAND front, WD is apparently still using their BiCS 5 112L NAND here, which means we're looking at 4x 2 TB NAND chips, each with 16 1Tbit TLC dies on-board, twice as many dies as were used on the NAND chips for the 4 TB model.

The peak read speed of the new 8TB model is 7,200 MB/sec, which is actually a smidge below the performance the 4 TB and 2 TB models due to the overhead from the additional NAND dies. Meanwhile peak sequential write speeds remain at 6,600 MB/sec, while 4K random write performance maxes out at 1200K IOPS for both reads and writes. It goes without saying that this is a step below the performance of the market flagship PCIe 5.0 SSDs available today, but it's going to be a bit longer until anyone else besides Phison is shipping a PCIe 5.0 controller – never mind the fact that these drives aren't available in 8 TB capacities.

The 8 TB SN850X also keeps the same drive endurance progression as the rest of the SN850X family. In this case, double the NAND brings double the endurance of the 4 TB model, for an overall endurance of 4800 terabytes written (TBW). Or in terms of drive writes per day, this is the same 0.33 rating as the other SN850X drives.

WD_Back SN850X SSD Specifications
Capacity	8 TB	4 TB	2 TB	1 TB
Controller	WD In-House: 8 Channel, DRAM (DDR4)
NAND Flash	WD BiCS 5 TLC
Form-Factor, Interface	Double-Sided M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 x4, NVMe		Single-Sided M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 x4, NVMe
Sequential Read	7200 MB/s	7300 MB/s	7300 MB/s	7300 MB/s
Sequential Write	6600 MB/s	6600 MB/s	6600 MB/s	6300 MB/s
Random Read IOPS	1200K	1200K	1200K	800K
Random Write IOPS	1200K	1100K	1100K	1100K
SLC Caching	Yes
TCG Opal Encryption	2.01
Warranty	5 Years
Write Endurance	4800 TBW 0.33 DWPD	2400 TBW 0.33 DWPD	1200 TBW 0.33 DWPD	600 TBW 0.33 DWPD
MSRP (No Heatsink)	$850	$260	$140	$85

Western Digital's WD_Black SN850X is available both with and without aluminum heatsink. The version without a heatsink aimed at laptops and BYOC setups costs $849.99, whereas a version with an aluminum heat spreader comes at $899.99. In both cases the 8 TB drive carries a significant price premium over the existing 4 TB model, which is readily available for $259.99.

This kind of price premium is unfortunately typical for 8 TB drives, and will likely remain so until both supply and demand for the high-capacity drives picks up to bring prices down. Still, with rival drives such as Corsair's MP600 Pro XT 8 TB and Sabrent's Rocket 4 Plus 8 TB going for $965.99 and $1,199.90 respectively, the introduction of the 8 TB SN850X is definitely pushing high-capacity M.2 SSD prices down, albeit slowly. So for systems with multiple M.2 slots, at least, the sweet spot on drive pricing is still to get two 4 TB SSDs.

In an unexpected announcement during their quarterly earnings call this week, Western Digital revealed that it has begun sampling an upcoming 32TB hard drive. The nearline HDD is aimed at hyperscalers, and relies on a combination of Westen Digital's EAMR technology, as well as shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology to hit their highest capacity figures to date.

Western Digital's 32TB HDD uses all of the company's most advanced technologies. Besides energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR/ePMR 2 to be more precise) technology, WD is also leveraging triple-stage actuators for better positioning of heads and two-dimensional (TDMR) read heads, OptiNAND for extra performance and reliability, distributed sector (DSEC) technology and a proprietary error correcting code (ECC) technology. And, most importantly, UltraSMR technology to provide additional capacity.

"We are shipping samples of our 32TB UltraSMR/ePMR nearline hard drives to select customers," said David Goeckeler, chief executive of Western Digital, at the earnings call. "These drives feature advanced triple-stage actuators and OptiNAND technology which are designed for seamless qualification, integration and deployment in hyperscale cloud and enterprise data centers while maintaining exceptional reliability."

Seagate is currently shipping its 30TB Exos HDDs based on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) platform called Modaic 3+ to select exascalers, and the company has implied that it can build a 32TB version of the drive using SMR. Therefore, from capacity point of view, Western Digital's announcement means that the company has caught up with its rival.

As with the comapny's other UltraSMR drives, the 32TB nearline drive is aimed at WD's enterprise customers, whose infrastructure can handle the additional management requirements that SMR imposes. As SMR in enterprise drives is not transparent, it's up to the host to manage many of the complexities that come with a hard drive that isn't suited for random writes. Though at least in WD's case, the upshot is that UltraSMR also offers a more significant density increase than other SMR implementations, using a larger number of SMR bands to increase HDD capacity by up to 20%.

Working backwards, that 20% capacity increase also means that WD's new drive is starting from 2.56TB CMR platters. And while 2.56TB makes for a very decent areal density, this would mean that WD is still behind rival Seagate in terms of areal density overall, as Seagate has 3TB CMR platters in its latest HAMR-based Exos drives.

Hand-held gaming consoles based on notebook platforms (such as the Valve SteamDeck, ASUS ROG Ally, and the MSI Claw) are one of the fastest growing segments in the PC gaming market. The form-factor of such systems has created a demand for M.2 2230 NVMe SSDs. Almost all vendors have a play in this market, and even Micron has OEM SSDs (such as the Micron 2400, 2550, and 2500 series) in this form-factor. Crucial has strangely not had an offering with its own brand name to target this segment, but that changes today with the launch of the Crucial P310 NVMe SSD.

The Crucial P310 is a family of M.2 2230 PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSDs boasting class-leading read/write speeds of 7.1 GBps and 6 GBps. The family currently has two capacity points - 1 TB and 2 TB. Micron claims that the use of its 232L 3D NAND and Phison's latest E27T DRAM-less controller (fabricated in TSMC's 12nm process) help in reducing power consumption under active use compared to the competition - directly translating to better battery life for the primary use-case involving gaming handheld consoles.

Based on the specifications, it appears that the drives are using 232L 3D QLC. Compared to the recently-released Micron 2550 SSD series in the same form-factor, a swap in the controller has enabled some improvements in both power efficiency and performance. The other specifications are summarized in the table below.

Crucial P310 SSD Specifications
Capacity	2 TB	1 TB
Controller	Phison E27T (DRAM-less)
NAND Flash	Micron 232L 3D QLC NAND
Form-Factor, Interface	Single-Sided M.2-2230 PCIe 4.0 x4, NVMe
Sequential Read	7100 MB/s
Sequential Write	6000 MB/s
Random Read IOPS	1 M
Random Write IOPS	1.2 M
SLC Caching	Yes
TCG Pyrite Encryption	Yes
Warranty	5 Years
Write Endurance	440 TBW 0.12 DWPD	220 TBW 0.12 DWPD
MSRP	$215	$115

The power efficiency, cost, and capacity points are plus points for the Crucial P310 family. However, the endurance ratings are quite low. Gaming workloads are inherently read-heavy, and this may not be a concern for the average consumer. However, a 0.12 DWPD rating may turn out to be a negative aspect when compared against the competition's 0.33 DWPD offerings in the same segment.

Western Digital has quietly introduced an 8 TB version of its high-end SN850X SSD, doubling the top capacity of the well-regarded drive family. The new drive offers performance on par with other members of the range, but with twice as much capacity as the previous top-end model – and with a sizable price premium to go with its newfound capacity.

Western Digital introduced its WD_Black SN850X SSDs in the summer of 2022, releasing single-sided 1 TB and 2 TB models, along with a double-sided 4 TB model. But now almost two years down the line, the company has seen it fit to introduce the even higher capacity 8 TB model to serve as their flagship PCIe 4.0 SSD, and keep with the times of NAND prices and SSD capacity demands.

Like the other SN850X models, WD is using their in-house, 8-channel controller for the new 8 TB model, which sports a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface. And being that this is a high-end SSD, the controller is paired with DRAM (DDR4) for page index caching, though WD doesn't disclose how much DRAM is on any given model. On the NAND front, WD is apparently still using their BiCS 5 112L NAND here, which means we're looking at 4x 2 TB NAND chips, each with 16 1Tbit TLC dies on-board, twice as many dies as were used on the NAND chips for the 4 TB model.

The peak read speed of the new 8TB model is 7,200 MB/sec, which is actually a smidge below the performance the 4 TB and 2 TB models due to the overhead from the additional NAND dies. Meanwhile peak sequential write speeds remain at 6,600 MB/sec, while 4K random write performance maxes out at 1200K IOPS for both reads and writes. It goes without saying that this is a step below the performance of the market flagship PCIe 5.0 SSDs available today, but it's going to be a bit longer until anyone else besides Phison is shipping a PCIe 5.0 controller – never mind the fact that these drives aren't available in 8 TB capacities.

The 8 TB SN850X also keeps the same drive endurance progression as the rest of the SN850X family. In this case, double the NAND brings double the endurance of the 4 TB model, for an overall endurance of 4800 terabytes written (TBW). Or in terms of drive writes per day, this is the same 0.33 rating as the other SN850X drives.

WD_Back SN850X SSD Specifications
Capacity	8 TB	4 TB	2 TB	1 TB
Controller	WD In-House: 8 Channel, DRAM (DDR4)
NAND Flash	WD BiCS 5 TLC
Form-Factor, Interface	Double-Sided M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 x4, NVMe		Single-Sided M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 x4, NVMe
Sequential Read	7200 MB/s	7300 MB/s	7300 MB/s	7300 MB/s
Sequential Write	6600 MB/s	6600 MB/s	6600 MB/s	6300 MB/s
Random Read IOPS	1200K	1200K	1200K	800K
Random Write IOPS	1200K	1100K	1100K	1100K
SLC Caching	Yes
TCG Opal Encryption	2.01
Warranty	5 Years
Write Endurance	4800 TBW 0.33 DWPD	2400 TBW 0.33 DWPD	1200 TBW 0.33 DWPD	600 TBW 0.33 DWPD
MSRP (No Heatsink)	$850	$260	$140	$85

Western Digital's WD_Black SN850X is available both with and without aluminum heatsink. The version without a heatsink aimed at laptops and BYOC setups costs $849.99, whereas a version with an aluminum heat spreader comes at $899.99. In both cases the 8 TB drive carries a significant price premium over the existing 4 TB model, which is readily available for $259.99.

This kind of price premium is unfortunately typical for 8 TB drives, and will likely remain so until both supply and demand for the high-capacity drives picks up to bring prices down. Still, with rival drives such as Corsair's MP600 Pro XT 8 TB and Sabrent's Rocket 4 Plus 8 TB going for $965.99 and $1,199.90 respectively, the introduction of the 8 TB SN850X is definitely pushing high-capacity M.2 SSD prices down, albeit slowly. So for systems with multiple M.2 slots, at least, the sweet spot on drive pricing is still to get two 4 TB SSDs.

Kingston is expected to release its latest NV3 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, which is designed for low-power and high-storage use.

© Kingston

Lexar has a long history of serving the flash-based consumer storage market in the form of SSDs, memory cards, and USB flash drives. After having started out as a Micron brand, the company was acquired by Longsys which has diversified its product lineup with regular introduction of new products. Recently, the company announced a number of portable SSDs targeting different market segments. The Lexar ARMOR 700 Portable SSD makes its entry as the new flagship in the 20 Gbps PSSD segment.

Despite its flagship positioning and rugged nature, the ARMOR 700 is reasonably priced thanks to the use of a native USB flash controller - the Silicon Motion SM2320. Similar to the SL500, the product uses YMTC 3D TLC NAND (compared to the usual Micron or BiCS NAND that we have seen in SM2320-based PSSDs from other vendors). Read on for a detailed look at the ARMOR 700, including an analysis of its internals and evaluation of its performance consistency, power consumption, and thermal profile.

MSI unveiled a new PCIe-based M.2 expansion card at Computex this year, featuring two PCIe NVMe Gen 5 drive bays that are hot-swappable and cooled by a single large GPU cooler fan.

© Future

Lexar has a long history of serving the flash-based consumer storage market in the form of SSDs, memory cards, and USB flash drives. After having started out as a Micron brand, the company was acquired by Longsys which has diversified its product lineup with regular introduction of new products. Recently, the company announced a number of portable SSDs targeting different market segments. The Lexar ARMOR 700 Portable SSD makes its entry as the new flagship in the 20 Gbps PSSD segment.

Despite its flagship positioning and rugged nature, the ARMOR 700 is reasonably priced thanks to the use of a native USB flash controller - the Silicon Motion SM2320. Similar to the SL500, the product uses YMTC 3D TLC NAND (compared to the usual Micron or BiCS NAND that we have seen in SM2320-based PSSDs from other vendors). Read on for a detailed look at the ARMOR 700, including an analysis of its internals and evaluation of its performance consistency, power consumption, and thermal profile.

UPDATE 5/17, 6 PM: Western Digital has confirmed that the new 2.5-inch T GB HDDs uses 6 SMR platters

The vast majority of laptops nowadays use solid-state drives, which is why the development of new, higher-capacity 2.5-inch hard drives has all but come to a halt. Or rather, it almost has. It seems that the 2.5-inch form factor has a bit more life left in it after all, as today Western Digital has released a slate of new external storage products based on a new, high-capacity 6 TB 2.5-inch hard drive.

WD's new 6 TB spinner is being used to offer upgraded versions of the company's My Passport, Black P10, and and G-DRIVE ArmorATD portable storage products. Notably, however, WD isn't selling the bare 2.5-inch drive on a standalone basis – at least not yet – so for the time being it's entirely reserved for use in external storage.

Consequently, WD isn't publishing much about the 6 TB hard drive itself. The maximum read speed for these products is listed at 130 MB/sec – the same as WD's existing externals – and write performance goes unmentioned.

Notably, all of these 6 TB devices are thicker than their existing 5 TB counterparts, which strongly suggests that WD has increased their storage capacity not by improving their areal density, but by adding another platter to their existing drive platform (which WD has since confirmed). This, in turn, would help to explain why these new drives are being used in external storage products, as WD's 5 TB 2.5-inch drives are already 15mm thick and using 5 platters. 15mm is the highest standard thickness for a 2.5-inch form-factor, and already incompatible with a decent number of portable devices. External drives, in turn, are the only place these even thicker 2.5-inch drives would fit.

WD's specifications also gloss over whether these drives are based on shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology. The company was already using SMR for their 5 TB drives in order to hit the necessary storage density there, and WD has since confirmed that this is exactly the case. Which is likely why the company isn't publishing write performance specifications for the drives, as we've seen device-managed SMR drives bottom out as low as 10 MB/second in our testing when the drive needs to rewrite data.

Depending on the specific drive model, all of the external storage drives use either a USB-C connector, or the very quaint USB Micro-B 3.0 connector. Though regardless of the physical connector used, all of the drives feature a USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5Gbps) electrical interface, which is more than ample given the drives' physically-limited transfer speeds.

Wrapping things up, according to WD the new drives are available at retail immediately. The WD My Passport Ultra and WD My Passport Ultra for Mac with USB-C both retail for $199.99; the WD My Passport and WD My Passport for Mac are $179.99; the WD My Passport Works With USB-C is $184.99; the gaming-focused WD_Black P10 Game Drive sells for $184.99, and the SanDisk Professional G-Drive ArmorATD is $229.99. All of Western Digital's external storage drives are backed with a three-year limited warranty.

Sabrent tends to get into news when it launches ultra-high-performance SSDs for enthusiast-grade desktops, but this week the company introduced a completely different type of product: a small form-factor M.2-2242 SSD aimed at Lenovo's Legion Go handheld and ultra-thin laptops that don't accomodate M.2-2280 drives. And even though it's not an enthusiast-grade drive, the Rocket Nano still boasts with quite decent performance and capacity.

The Sabrent Rocket Nano 2242 (SB-2142) drive is based on the Phison E27T platform, a PCIe 4.0 x4 controller that is that is designed for mainstream DRAM-less SSDs, and in the case of the Rocket Nano, is paired with 3D TLC memory. The SSD is available in a single 1TB configuration, and is rated for read speeds up to 5 GB/s. Interestingly, the Phison E27T controller itself is rated for read speeds up to 7 GB/s, so it appears that the petite Rocket Nano isn't making full use of the controller's performance.

Sabrent positions its Rocket Nano 2242 SSD as drives for upgrading Lenovo's Legion Go portable game console, select Lenovo ThinkPad laptops, and other M.2-2242-sized PCs that can't accomodate larger 2280 drives. Keeping in mind that most devices shipping with M.2-2242 SSDscome with pretty slow stock drives, Sabrent solution seems to be a viable product for such upgrades. All the while, Sabrent's Rocket Nano 2242 will also work in systems with a PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slots, so the market for these drives is pretty wide.

Sabrent's Rocket Nano 2242 SSD 1 TB (SB-2142-1TB) SSD has a recommended price of $99.99, which is more or less in line with other 1 TB drives in the same form-factor and offering comparable performance. The SSD is currently available at Amazon for $101.

Sources: Tom's Hardware, Sabrent

Thanks to cross-platform availability, handy editing tools, seamless sharing, and AI add-ons, Google Photos is the best app to manage your ever-growing media library. While Google Photos is free to download and use, the backup storage isn't. You get 15GB of free space, which is spread across Gmail, Google Drive, and device backups. While it's sufficient to get started with Google's services, you will run out of space soon if you snap and back up a lot of pictures and videos using one of the best camera phones.

There are a lot of options when it comes to M.2 SSDs, but if you're looking for one that's going to fit an M.2 2230 slot, then your search for something great becomes a little less complicated. While there aren't that many 2230 SSDs out on the market, there's still a good selection, mostly thanks to the recent boom with PC gaming handhelds.

The WD_Black is currently available at Amazon for just $84—the lowest price we've ever seen for the SSD.

© Western Digital

To boost security for its users, Microsoft has disabled SMB1 and Guest Signing protocol by default, securing billions of Windows 11 24H2 PCs as it would not allow access to unsecured NAS devices, prompting the respective manufacturers to enable it.

© Microsoft

Nearly 400 exhibitors representing the boldest energy innovations in the United States came together last week at the annual ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit. The conference, hosted in Dallas by the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E), showcased the agency’s bets on early-stage energy technologies that can disrupt the status quo. U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm spoke at the summit. “The people in this room are America’s best hope” in the race to unleash the power of clean energy, she said. “The technologies you create will decide whether we win that race. But no pressure,” she quipped. IEEE Spectrum spent three days meandering the aisles of the showcase. Here are five of our favorite demonstrations.

Gas Li-ion batteries thwart extreme cold

South 8 Technologies demonstrates the cold tolerance of its Li-ion battery by burying it in ice at the 2024 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit. Emily Waltz

Made with a liquified gas electrolyte instead of the standard liquid solvent, a new kind of lithium-ion battery that stands up to extreme cold, made by South 8 Technologies in San Diego, won’t freeze until temps drop below –80 °C. That’s a big improvement on conventional Li-ion batteries, which start to degrade when temps reach 0 °C and shut down at about –20 °C. “You lose about half of your range in an electric vehicle if you drive it in the middle of winter in Michigan,” says Cyrus Rustomji, cofounder of South 8. To prove the company’s point, Rustomji and his team set out a bucket of dry ice at nearly –80 °C at their booth at the ARPA-E summit and put flashlights in it—one powered by a South 8 battery and one powered by a conventional Li-ion cell. The latter flashlight went out after about 10 minutes, and South 8’s kept going for the next 15 hours. Rustomji says he expects EV batteries made with South 8’s technology to maintain nearly full range at –40 °C, and gradually degrade in temperatures lower than that.

South 8 Technologies

Conventional Li-ion batteries use liquid solvents, such as ethylene and dimethyl carbonate, as the electrolyte. The electrolyte serves as a medium through which lithium salt moves from one electrode to the other in the battery, shuttling electricity. When it’s cold, the carbonates thicken, which lowers the power of the battery. They can also freeze, which shuts down all conductivity. South 8 swapped out the carbonate for some industrial liquified gases with low freezing points (a recipe the company won’t disclose).

Using liquified gases also reduces fire risk because the gas very quickly evaporates from a damaged battery cell, removing fuel that could burn and cause the battery to catch fire. If a conventional Li-ion battery gets damaged, it can short-circuit and quickly become hot—like over 800 °C hot. This causes the liquid electrolyte to heat adjacent cells and potentially start a fire.

There’s another benefit to this battery, and this one will make EV drivers very happy: It will take only 10 minutes to reach an 80 percent charge in EVs powered by these batteries, Rustomji estimates. That’s because liquified gas has a lower viscosity than carbonate-based electrolytes, which allows the lithium salt to move from one electrode to the other at a faster rate, shortening the time it takes to recharge the battery.

South 8’s latest improvement is a high-voltage cathode that reduces material costs and could enable fast charging down to 5 minutes for a full charge. “We have the world record for a high-voltage, low-temperature cathode,” says Rustomji.

Liquid cooling won’t leak on servers

Chilldyne guarantees that its liquid-cooling system won’t leak even if tubes get hacked in half, as IEEE Spectrum editor Emily Waltz demonstrates at the 2024 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit. Emily Waltz

Data centers need serious cooling technologies to keep servers from overheating, and sometimes air-conditioning just isn’t enough. In fact, the latest Blackwell chips from Nvidia require liquid cooling, which is more energy efficient than air. But liquid cooling tends to make data-center operators nervous. “A bomb won’t do as much damage as a leaky liquid-cooling system,” says Steve Harrington, CEO of Chilldyne. His company, based in Carlsbad, Calif., offers liquid cooling that’s guaranteed not to leak, even if the coolant lines get chopped in half. (They aren’t kidding: Chilldyne brought an axe to its demonstration at ARPA-E and let Spectrum try it out. Watch the blue cooling liquid immediately disappear from the tube after it’s chopped.)

Chilldyne

The system is leakproof because Chilldyne’s negative-pressure system pulls rather than pushes liquid coolant through tubes, like a vacuum. The tubes wind through servers, absorbing heat through cold plates, and return the warmed liquid to tanks in a cooling distribution unit. This unit transfers the heat outside and supplies cooled liquid back to the servers. If a component anywhere in the cooling loop breaks, the liquid is immediately sucked back into the tanks before it can leak. Key to the technology: low-thermal-resistance cold plates attached to each server’s processors, such as the CPUs or GPUs. The cold plates absorb heat by convection, transferring the heat to the coolant tube that runs through it. Chilldyne optimized the cold plate using corkscrew-shaped metal channels, called turbulators, that force water around them “like little tornadoes,” maximizing the heat absorbed, says Harrington. The company developed the cold plate under an ARPA-E grant and is now measuring the energy savings of liquid cooling through an ARPA-E program.

Salvaged mining waste also sequesters CO₂

Phoenix Tailings’ senior research scientist Rita Silbernagel explains how mining waste contains useful metals and rare earth elements and can also be used as a place to store carbon dioxide.Emily Waltz

Mining leaves behind piles of waste after the commercially viable material is extracted. This waste, known as tailings, can contain rare earth elements and valuable metals that are too difficult to extract with conventional mining techniques. Phoenix Tailings—a startup based in Woburn, Mass.—extracts metals and rare earth elements from tailings in a process that leaves behind no waste and creates no direct carbon dioxide emissions. The company’s process starts with a hydrometallurgical treatment that separates rare earth elements from the tailings, which contain iron, aluminum, and other common elements. Next the company uses a novel solvent extraction method to separate the rare earth elements from one another and purify the desired element in the form of an oxide. The rare earth oxide then undergoes a molten-salt electrolysis process that converts it into a solid metal form. Phoenix Tailings focuses on extracting neodymium, neodymium-praseodymium alloy, dysprosium, and ferro dysprosium alloy, which are rare earth metals used in permanent magnets for EVs, wind turbines, jet engines, and other applications. The company is evaluating several tailings sites in the United States, including in upstate New York.

The company has also developed a process to extract metals such as nickel, copper, and cobalt from mining tailings while simultaneously sequestering carbon dioxide. The approach involves injecting CO₂ into the tailings, where it reacts with minerals, transforming them into carbonates—compounds that contain the carbonate ion, which contains three oxygen atoms and one carbon atom. After the mineral carbonation process, the nickel or other metals are selectively leached from the mixture, yielding high-quality nickel that can be used by EV-battery and stainless-steel industries.

Better still, this whole process, says Rita Silbernagel, senior research scientist at Phoenix Tailings, absorbs more CO₂ than it emits.

Hydrokinetic turbines: a new business model

Emrgy adjusts the height of its hydrokinetic turbines at the 2024 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit. The company plans to install them in old irrigation channels to generate renewable energy and new revenue streams for rural communities. Emily Waltz

These hydrokinetic turbines run in irrigation channels, generating electricity and revenue for rural communities. Developed by Emrgy in Atlanta, the turbines can change in height and blade pitch based on the flow of the water. The company plans to put them in irrigation channels that were built to bring water from snowmelt in the Rocky Mountains to agricultural areas in the western United States. Emrgy estimates that there are more than 160,000 kilometers of these waterways in the country. The system is aging and losing water, but it’s hard for water districts to justify the cost of repairing them, says Tom Cuthbert, chief technology officer at Emrgy. The company’s solution is to place its hydrokinetic turbines throughout these waterways as a way to generate renewable electricity and pay for upgrades to the irrigation channels.

The concept of placing hydrokinetic turbines in waterways isn’t new, but until recent years, connecting them to the grid wasn’t practical. Emrgy’s timing takes advantage of the groundwork laid by the solar power industry. The company has five pilot projects in the works in the United States and New Zealand. “We found that existing water infrastructure is a massive overlooked real estate segment that is ripe for renewable energy development,” says Emily Morris, CEO and founder of Emrgy.

Pressurized water stores energy deep underground

Quidnet Energy brought a wellhead to the 2024 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit to demonstrate its geoengineered energy-storage system.Emily Waltz

Quidnet Energy brought a whole wellhead to the ARPA-E summit to demonstrate its underground pumped hydro storage technique. The Houston-based company’s geoengineered system stores energy as pressurized water deep underground. It consists of a surface-level pond, a deep well, an underground reservoir at the end of the well, and a pump system that moves pressurized water from the pond to the underground reservoir and back. The design doesn’t require an elevation change like traditional pumped storage hydropower.

Quidnet’s system consists of a surface-level pond, a deep well, an underground reservoir at the end of the well, and a pump system that moves pressurized water from the pond to the underground reservoir and back.Quidnet Energy

It works like this: Electricity from renewable sources powers a pump that sends water from the surface pond into a wellhead and down a well that’s about 300 meters deep. At the end of the well, the pressure from the pumped water flows into a previously engineered fracture in the rock, creating a reservoir that’s hundreds of meters wide and sits beneath the weight of the whole column of rock above it, says Bunker Hill, vice president of engineering at Quidnet. The wellhead then closes and the water remains under high pressure, keeping energy stored in the reservoir for days if necessary. When electricity is needed, the well is opened, letting the pressurized water run up the same well. Above ground, the water passes through a hydroelectric turbine, generating 2 to 8 megawatts of electricity. The spent water then returns to the surface pond, ready for the next cycle. “The hard part is making sure the underground reservoir doesn’t lose water,” says Hill. To that end, the company developed customized sealing solutions that get injected into the fracture, sealing in the water.

Modern SSDs are an engineering wonder. They're extremely fast and very reliable, despite being housed next to massive heat-belching graphics cards in gaming PCs. But like all silicon-based chips, they have limits to how hot they can run before losing data or failing completely. However, two teams of researchers have developed a type of flash memory that's capable of retaining data at temperatures that make an afternoon on Venus look cold in comparison.

The details of the work were published in the Nature journal (via Interesting Engineering), though the University of Pennsylvania nicely summarised the findings for those without a background in doctorate-level material science. Two research teams in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, headed by Deep Jariwala and Roy Olsson, dedicated months of work to finding the perfect thickness of ferroelectric aluminum scandium nitride (AlScN), to use as a base material for a flash memory device.

Everyday flash memory, such as that found in USB memory sticks, SD cards, and SSDs, uses silicon, of course, and it's pushed to levels that would be unthinkable just a decade ago. The best gaming SSDs hold multiple terabytes of data and can transfer thousands of megabytes in a second. They also last for years, thanks to write endurance levels in the petabyte region.

However, they do have one significant failing—they're not very good at dealing with high temperatures. Once above a certain temperature, silicon-based flash cells struggle to retain data and even the very best of them (used in the space industry, for example) fail at 200 degrees Celsius (392 degrees Fahrenheit).

So when Jariwala and Olsson's teams created a flash memory using AlScN that can withstand up to 600 degrees Celsius (1,112 degrees Fahrenheit), you know they had something special on their hands. Not that it was easy to get it right, mind, as the thickness of the AlScN layer had to be just right.

“If it’s too thin, the increased activity can drive diffusion and degrade a material. If too thick, there goes the ferroelectric switching we were looking for…[s]o, my lab and Roy Olsson’s lab worked together for months to find this Goldilocks thickness,” said Dhiren Pradhan, a post-doctoral researcher in Jariwala's team.

He also said that "AlScN’s crystal structure also gives it notably more stable and strong bonds between atoms, meaning it’s not just heat-resistant but also pretty durable,” making it ideal for use in extreme environments, not just those that happen to be somewhat on the toasty side.

Peak Storage

Best SSD for gaming: The best speedy storage today.
Best NVMe SSD: Compact M.2 drives.
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Best external SSDs: Plug-in storage upgrades.

The obvious application for this kind of material is for spacecraft landing on planets such as Venus, which has a mean surface temperature of 464 degrees Celsius (867 degrees Fahrenheit). You might think that this degree of heat would fry any silicon chip, not just flash memory cells, and you'd be right.

In such cases, silicon carbide is used as the semiconducting material but as Pradhan explains, "it is nowhere close to the processing power of silicon processors, so advanced processing and data-heavy computing such as AI can’t really be done in high-temperature or any harsh environments."

The toughness of this new material means the memory could be better integrated into silicon carbide chips, helping to improve their performance.

There's no immediate application of this technology for gaming PCs, though, but the research may lead to the development of volatile and non-volatile memory chips that are even more heat-resistant than current ones. That would help to improve data retention in systems that produce lots of heat or remove the need to use large and costly heatsinks, something that is a necessity with the latest PCIe 5.0 SSDs.

© Eric Sucar/University of Pennsylvania

The Blaustahl USB storage device can hold only 8 kilobytes of data for 200 years.

© Rostec

UPDATE 5/17, 6 PM: Western Digital has confirmed that the new 2.5-inch T GB HDDs uses 6 SMR platters

The vast majority of laptops nowadays use solid-state drives, which is why the development of new, higher-capacity 2.5-inch hard drives has all but come to a halt. Or rather, it almost has. It seems that the 2.5-inch form factor has a bit more life left in it after all, as today Western Digital has released a slate of new external storage products based on a new, high-capacity 6 TB 2.5-inch hard drive.

WD's new 6 TB spinner is being used to offer upgraded versions of the company's My Passport, Black P10, and and G-DRIVE ArmorATD portable storage products. Notably, however, WD isn't selling the bare 2.5-inch drive on a standalone basis – at least not yet – so for the time being it's entirely reserved for use in external storage.

Consequently, WD isn't publishing much about the 6 TB hard drive itself. The maximum read speed for these products is listed at 130 MB/sec – the same as WD's existing externals – and write performance goes unmentioned.

Notably, all of these 6 TB devices are thicker than their existing 5 TB counterparts, which strongly suggests that WD has increased their storage capacity not by improving their areal density, but by adding another platter to their existing drive platform (which WD has since confirmed). This, in turn, would help to explain why these new drives are being used in external storage products, as WD's 5 TB 2.5-inch drives are already 15mm thick and using 5 platters. 15mm is the highest standard thickness for a 2.5-inch form-factor, and already incompatible with a decent number of portable devices. External drives, in turn, are the only place these even thicker 2.5-inch drives would fit.

WD's specifications also gloss over whether these drives are based on shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology. The company was already using SMR for their 5 TB drives in order to hit the necessary storage density there, and WD has since confirmed that this is exactly the case. Which is likely why the company isn't publishing write performance specifications for the drives, as we've seen device-managed SMR drives bottom out as low as 10 MB/second in our testing when the drive needs to rewrite data.

Depending on the specific drive model, all of the external storage drives use either a USB-C connector, or the very quaint USB Micro-B 3.0 connector. Though regardless of the physical connector used, all of the drives feature a USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5Gbps) electrical interface, which is more than ample given the drives' physically-limited transfer speeds.

Wrapping things up, according to WD the new drives are available at retail immediately. The WD My Passport Ultra and WD My Passport Ultra for Mac with USB-C both retail for $199.99; the WD My Passport and WD My Passport for Mac are $179.99; the WD My Passport Works With USB-C is $184.99; the gaming-focused WD_Black P10 Game Drive sells for $184.99, and the SanDisk Professional G-Drive ArmorATD is $229.99. All of Western Digital's external storage drives are backed with a three-year limited warranty.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Register: The co-author of SQL, the standardized query language for relational databases, has come out in support of the NoSQL database movement that seeks to escape the tabular confines of the RDBMS. Speaking to The Register as SQL marks its 50th birthday, Donald Chamberlin, who first proposed the language with IBM colleague Raymond Boyce in a 1974 paper [PDF], explains that NoSQL databases and their query languages could help perform the tasks relational systems were never designed for. "The world doesn't stay the same thing, especially in computer science," he says. "It's a very fast, evolving, industry. New requirements are coming along and technology has to change to meet them, I think that's what's happening. The NoSQL movement is motivated by new kinds of applications, particularly web applications, that need massive scalability and high performance. Relational databases were developed in an earlier generation when scalability and performance weren't quite as important. To get the scalability and performance that you need for modern apps, many systems are relaxing some of the constraints of the relational data model." [...] A long-time IBMer, Chamberlin is now semi-retired, but finds time to fulfill a role as a technical advisor for NoSQL company Couchbase. In the role, he has become an advocate for a new query language designed to overcome the "impedance mismatch" between data structures in the application language and a database, he says. UC San Diego professor Yannis Papakonstantinou has proposed SQL++ to solve this problem, with a view to addressing impedance mismatch between heavily object-based JavaScript, the core language for web development and the assumed relational approach embedded in SQL. Like C++, SQL++ is designed as a compatible extension of an earlier language, SQL, but is touted as better able to handle the JSON file format inherent in JavaScript. Couchbase and AWS have adopted the language, although the cloud giant calls it PartiQL. At the end of the interview, Chamblin adds that "I don't think SQL is going to go away. A large part of the world's business data is encoded in SQL, and data is very sticky. Once you've got your database, you're going to leave it there. Also, relational systems do a very good job of what they were designed to do... "[I]f you're a startup company that wants to sell shoes on the web or something, you're going to need a database, and one of those SQL implementations will do the job for free. I think relational databases and the SQL language will be with us for a long time."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sabrent tends to get into news when it launches ultra-high-performance SSDs for enthusiast-grade desktops, but this week the company introduced a completely different type of product: a small form-factor M.2-2242 SSD aimed at Lenovo's Legion Go handheld and ultra-thin laptops that don't accomodate M.2-2280 drives. And even though it's not an enthusiast-grade drive, the Rocket Nano still boasts with quite decent performance and capacity.

The Sabrent Rocket Nano 2242 (SB-2142) drive is based on the Phison E27T platform, a PCIe 4.0 x4 controller that is that is designed for mainstream DRAM-less SSDs, and in the case of the Rocket Nano, is paired with 3D TLC memory. The SSD is available in a single 1TB configuration, and is rated for read speeds up to 5 GB/s. Interestingly, the Phison E27T controller itself is rated for read speeds up to 7 GB/s, so it appears that the petite Rocket Nano isn't making full use of the controller's performance.

Sabrent positions its Rocket Nano 2242 SSD as drives for upgrading Lenovo's Legion Go portable game console, select Lenovo ThinkPad laptops, and other M.2-2242-sized PCs that can't accomodate larger 2280 drives. Keeping in mind that most devices shipping with M.2-2242 SSDscome with pretty slow stock drives, Sabrent solution seems to be a viable product for such upgrades. All the while, Sabrent's Rocket Nano 2242 will also work in systems with a PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slots, so the market for these drives is pretty wide.

Sabrent's Rocket Nano 2242 SSD 1 TB (SB-2142-1TB) SSD has a recommended price of $99.99, which is more or less in line with other 1 TB drives in the same form-factor and offering comparable performance. The SSD is currently available at Amazon for $101.

Sources: Tom's Hardware, Sabrent

Seagate Technology has reportedly notified its customers abouts its plans to raise prices on new hard drive orders and for demands that exceed prior agreements, echoing a similar move by Western Digital, which increased its prices earlier this month. These changes come in response to a surge in demand for high-capacity HDDs and constraints in supply due to decreased production capabilities of both Seagate and Western Digital, reports TrendForce.

According to industry insights reported by TechNews, the sector anticipates that the scarcity of high-capacity HDD products will persist throughout the current quarter and possibly extend over the entire year. It is forecasted that HDD prices will rise by 5% to 10% in Q2 2024 alone and could increase further as a reault of the ongoing challenges faced by the storage industry.

The primary driver behind Seagate's decision is increased demand for high-capacity HDDs, which are used to train AI models. This demand spike, coupled with a reduction in production output from hard drive makers, has created a significant supply-demand imbalance. As a result, Seagate has decided to adjust their pricing strategy to manage the situation. Further exacerbating the issue are global inflationary pressures which continue to inflate costs across the board, which also contributed to the company's decision to increase prices, Seagate said in a message to clients published by TrendForce.

Seagate emphasized that its reduced production capacity has been a major challenge, hindering the company's ability to fulfill customer demands fully and promptly.

"As a result, we will be implementing price increases effective immediately on new orders and for demand that is over and above previously committed volumes," the alleged memo from Seagate reads. "Supply constraints are expected to continue and as such we anticipate that prices will continue to increase in the coming quarters."

Earlier this month Western Digital also informed its customers about price hikes for its HDD and SSD products. This notification was based on similar issues — higher than anticipated demand across the whole product range and additional supply chain challenges affecting the electronics sector. Western Digital's announcement made it clear that these disruptions are likely to continue, prompting further price adjustments.

Sources: TrendForce, TrendForce, TechNews

As Seagate ramps up shipments of its new heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR)-based Mozaic 3+ hard drive platform, the company is both in the enviable position of shipping the first major new hard drive technology in a decade, and the much less enviable position of proving the reliability of the first major new hard drive technology in a decade. Due to HAMR's use of temporal heating with its platters, as well as all-new read/write heads, HAMR introduces multiple new changes at once that have raise questions about how reliable the technology will be. Looking to address these matters (and further promote their HAMR drives), Seagate has published a fresh blog post outlining the company's R&D efforts, and why the company expects their HAMR drives to last several years – as long or longer than current PMR hard drives.

According to the company, the reliability of Mozaic 3+ drives on par with traditional drives relying on perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), the company says. In fact, components of HAMR HDDs have demonstrated a 50% increase in reliability over the past two years. Seagate says that Mozaic 3+ drives boast impressive durability metrics: their read/write heads have demonstrated capacity to handle over 3.2 petabytes of data transfer over 6,000 hours of operation, which exceeds data transfers of typical nearline hard drives by 20 times. Accordingly, Seagate is rating these drives for a mean time between failure (MTBF) 2.5 million hours, which is in-line with PMR-based drives.

Based on their field stress tests, involving over 500,000 Mozaic 3+ drives, Seagate says that the heads of Mozaic 3+ drives will last over seven years, surpassing the typical lifespan of current PMR-based drives. Generally, customers anticipate that modern PMR drives will last between four and five years with average usage, so these drives would exceed current expectations.

Altogether, Seagate is continuing aim for a seamless transition from PMR to HAMR drives in customer systems. That means ensuring that these new drives can fit into existing data center infrastructures without requiring any changes to enterprise specifications, warranty conditions, or form factors.

Lexar has a long history of serving the flash-based consumer storage market in the form of SSDs, memory cards, and USB flash drives. After having started out as a Micron brand, the company was acquired by Longsys which has diversified its product lineup with regular introduction of new products. Recently, the company announced a number of portable SSDs targeting different market segments. The Lexar SL500 Portable SSD is one of the moderately priced 20 Gbps PSSDs in that set.

The SL500 is able to achieve its price point thanks to the use of a native USB flash controller - the Silicon Motion SM2320. The unique aspect is the use of YMTC 3D TLC NAND (compared to the usual Micron or BiCS NAND that we have seen in previous SM2320-based PSSDs). Read on for a detailed look at the SL500, including an analysis of its internals and evaluation of its performance consistency, power consumption, and thermal profile.

Network-Attached Storage (NAS) systems are a godsend when it comes to storing and sharing large chunks of data with all your devices. Most NAS enclosures have more hard drive bays than even a gaming PC because you may require a lot of storage capacity depending on your workload. Heck, even if you don't need plenty of HDDs for your day-to-day tasks, you can still run some extra hard drives in RAID mode to improve the overall read/write speeds and protect your data from drive failure and corruption.

Slashdot reader quonset writes: The last floppy disk was manufactured in 2011. Despite no new supplies being available for over a decade, there are still people, and organizations, who rely on floppy disks. Each has their own story as to why they rely on what is essentially 1970s technology. From the BBC: Tom Persky, a US businessman, has been selling "new", as in, unopened, floppy disks for years and still finds the trade lucrative. He runs Floppydisk.com, which offers disks for about US$1 (£0.80) each, though some higher capacity versions cost up to US$10 (£8) per disk, he says. Persky has customers all over the world and you could split them roughly 50-50 into hobbyists and enthusiasts like Espen Kraft on one side, and industrial users on the other. This latter category encompasses people who use computers at work that require floppy disks to function. They are, essentially, locked in to a format that the rest of the world has largely forgotten. "I sell thousands of floppy disks to the airline industry, still," says Persky. He declines to elaborate. "Companies are not happy about when I talk about them." But it is well-known that some Boeing 747s, for example, use floppy disks to load critical software updates into their navigation and avionics computers. While these older aircraft might not be so common in Europe or the US these days, you might find one in the developing world, for instance, Persky hints. There are also pieces of factory equipment, government systems — or even animatronic figures — that still rely on floppy disks. And in San Francisco, the Muni Metro light railway, which launched in 1980, won't start up each morning unless the staff in charge pick up a floppy disk and slip it into the computer that controls the railway's Automatic Train Control System, or ATCS. "The computer has to be told what it's supposed to do every day," explains a spokesman for the San Francisco Municipal Transport Agency (SFMTA). "Without a hard drive, there is nowhere to install software on a permanent basis." This computer has to be restarted in such a way repeatedly, he adds — it can't simply be left on, for fear of its memory degrading. The article also includes this quote from a cybersecurity expert at Pen Test Partners. "If floppy was the only interface, the only way to get malware on to [the computer] would be via said floppy disk. That's quite a limiting factor for the attacker..."

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Sabrent tends to get into news when it launches ultra-high-performance SSDs for enthusiast-grade desktops, but this week the company introduced a completely different type of product: a small form-factor M.2-2242 SSD aimed at Lenovo's Legion Go handheld and ultra-thin laptops that don't accomodate M.2-2280 drives. And even though it's not an enthusiast-grade drive, the Rocket Nano still boasts with quite decent performance and capacity.

The Sabrent Rocket Nano 2242 (SB-2142) drive is based on the Phison E27T platform, a PCIe 4.0 x4 controller that is that is designed for mainstream DRAM-less SSDs, and in the case of the Rocket Nano, is paired with 3D TLC memory. The SSD is available in a single 1TB configuration, and is rated for read speeds up to 5 GB/s. Interestingly, the Phison E27T controller itself is rated for read speeds up to 7 GB/s, so it appears that the petite Rocket Nano isn't making full use of the controller's performance.

Sabrent positions its Rocket Nano 2242 SSD as drives for upgrading Lenovo's Legion Go portable game console, select Lenovo ThinkPad laptops, and other M.2-2242-sized PCs that can't accomodate larger 2280 drives. Keeping in mind that most devices shipping with M.2-2242 SSDscome with pretty slow stock drives, Sabrent solution seems to be a viable product for such upgrades. All the while, Sabrent's Rocket Nano 2242 will also work in systems with a PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slots, so the market for these drives is pretty wide.

Sabrent's Rocket Nano 2242 SSD 1 TB (SB-2142-1TB) SSD has a recommended price of $99.99, which is more or less in line with other 1 TB drives in the same form-factor and offering comparable performance. The SSD is currently available at Amazon for $101.

Sources: Tom's Hardware, Sabrent

Seagate Technology has reportedly notified its customers abouts its plans to raise prices on new hard drive orders and for demands that exceed prior agreements, echoing a similar move by Western Digital, which increased its prices earlier this month. These changes come in response to a surge in demand for high-capacity HDDs and constraints in supply due to decreased production capabilities of both Seagate and Western Digital, reports TrendForce.

According to industry insights reported by TechNews, the sector anticipates that the scarcity of high-capacity HDD products will persist throughout the current quarter and possibly extend over the entire year. It is forecasted that HDD prices will rise by 5% to 10% in Q2 2024 alone and could increase further as a reault of the ongoing challenges faced by the storage industry.

The primary driver behind Seagate's decision is increased demand for high-capacity HDDs, which are used to train AI models. This demand spike, coupled with a reduction in production output from hard drive makers, has created a significant supply-demand imbalance. As a result, Seagate has decided to adjust their pricing strategy to manage the situation. Further exacerbating the issue are global inflationary pressures which continue to inflate costs across the board, which also contributed to the company's decision to increase prices, Seagate said in a message to clients published by TrendForce.

Seagate emphasized that its reduced production capacity has been a major challenge, hindering the company's ability to fulfill customer demands fully and promptly.

"As a result, we will be implementing price increases effective immediately on new orders and for demand that is over and above previously committed volumes," the alleged memo from Seagate reads. "Supply constraints are expected to continue and as such we anticipate that prices will continue to increase in the coming quarters."

Earlier this month Western Digital also informed its customers about price hikes for its HDD and SSD products. This notification was based on similar issues — higher than anticipated demand across the whole product range and additional supply chain challenges affecting the electronics sector. Western Digital's announcement made it clear that these disruptions are likely to continue, prompting further price adjustments.

Sources: TrendForce, TrendForce, TechNews

As Seagate ramps up shipments of its new heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR)-based Mozaic 3+ hard drive platform, the company is both in the enviable position of shipping the first major new hard drive technology in a decade, and the much less enviable position of proving the reliability of the first major new hard drive technology in a decade. Due to HAMR's use of temporal heating with its platters, as well as all-new read/write heads, HAMR introduces multiple new changes at once that have raise questions about how reliable the technology will be. Looking to address these matters (and further promote their HAMR drives), Seagate has published a fresh blog post outlining the company's R&D efforts, and why the company expects their HAMR drives to last several years – as long or longer than current PMR hard drives.

According to the company, the reliability of Mozaic 3+ drives on par with traditional drives relying on perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), the company says. In fact, components of HAMR HDDs have demonstrated a 50% increase in reliability over the past two years. Seagate says that Mozaic 3+ drives boast impressive durability metrics: their read/write heads have demonstrated capacity to handle over 3.2 petabytes of data transfer over 6,000 hours of operation, which exceeds data transfers of typical nearline hard drives by 20 times. Accordingly, Seagate is rating these drives for a mean time between failure (MTBF) 2.5 million hours, which is in-line with PMR-based drives.

Based on their field stress tests, involving over 500,000 Mozaic 3+ drives, Seagate says that the heads of Mozaic 3+ drives will last over seven years, surpassing the typical lifespan of current PMR-based drives. Generally, customers anticipate that modern PMR drives will last between four and five years with average usage, so these drives would exceed current expectations.

Altogether, Seagate is continuing aim for a seamless transition from PMR to HAMR drives in customer systems. That means ensuring that these new drives can fit into existing data center infrastructures without requiring any changes to enterprise specifications, warranty conditions, or form factors.

Lexar has a long history of serving the flash-based consumer storage market in the form of SSDs, memory cards, and USB flash drives. After having started out as a Micron brand, the company was acquired by Longsys which has diversified its product lineup with regular introduction of new products. Recently, the company announced a number of portable SSDs targeting different market segments. The Lexar SL500 Portable SSD is one of the moderately priced 20 Gbps PSSDs in that set.

The SL500 is able to achieve its price point thanks to the use of a native USB flash controller - the Silicon Motion SM2320. The unique aspect is the use of YMTC 3D TLC NAND (compared to the usual Micron or BiCS NAND that we have seen in previous SM2320-based PSSDs). Read on for a detailed look at the SL500, including an analysis of its internals and evaluation of its performance consistency, power consumption, and thermal profile.

Seagate Technology has reportedly notified its customers abouts its plans to raise prices on new hard drive orders and for demands that exceed prior agreements, echoing a similar move by Western Digital, which increased its prices earlier this month. These changes come in response to a surge in demand for high-capacity HDDs and constraints in supply due to decreased production capabilities of both Seagate and Western Digital, reports TrendForce.

According to industry insights reported by TechNews, the sector anticipates that the scarcity of high-capacity HDD products will persist throughout the current quarter and possibly extend over the entire year. It is forecasted that HDD prices will rise by 5% to 10% in Q2 2024 alone and could increase further as a reault of the ongoing challenges faced by the storage industry.

The primary driver behind Seagate's decision is increased demand for high-capacity HDDs, which are used to train AI models. This demand spike, coupled with a reduction in production output from hard drive makers, has created a significant supply-demand imbalance. As a result, Seagate has decided to adjust their pricing strategy to manage the situation. Further exacerbating the issue are global inflationary pressures which continue to inflate costs across the board, which also contributed to the company's decision to increase prices, Seagate said in a message to clients published by TrendForce.

Seagate emphasized that its reduced production capacity has been a major challenge, hindering the company's ability to fulfill customer demands fully and promptly.

"As a result, we will be implementing price increases effective immediately on new orders and for demand that is over and above previously committed volumes," the alleged memo from Seagate reads. "Supply constraints are expected to continue and as such we anticipate that prices will continue to increase in the coming quarters."

Earlier this month Western Digital also informed its customers about price hikes for its HDD and SSD products. This notification was based on similar issues — higher than anticipated demand across the whole product range and additional supply chain challenges affecting the electronics sector. Western Digital's announcement made it clear that these disruptions are likely to continue, prompting further price adjustments.

Sources: TrendForce, TrendForce, TechNews