Chris Ramseyer

The new WD Blue and SanDisk Ultra with 3D BiCS FLASH appeared online for sale with up to 1TB, and a future 2TB capacity size coming soon. We have pricing and some paper performance data. These drives may be 850 EVO competitors.

GPU manufacturers' demand for HMB2 is insatiable. Just look at Nvidia's stock price to see the growth. The increase comes from emerging markets that require increased memory bandwidth to compute complex algorithms and are fueled by high bandwidth memory.

Two years ago we awarded an unnamed Apacer SSD the Computex Most Ridiculous Award. We didn't see the AR-15 inspired drive this year and just assumed Apacer killed the model, but the drive just landed on our door after signing the FFL paperwork.

Intel's VROC technology will soon change storage in ways we still can't foresee. What we can see, though, is the adapter cards that will enable users to make the most of Intel Skylake-X's built-in RAID technology.

Two new Corsair Add-in Card NVMe SSDs tipped up on Newegg today. The cards come under the flagship Neutron umbrella with a new model name: NX500. Corsair claims up to 3,000 MB/s sequential performance, but flagship products carry a flagship price.

Today we test a pair of early Maxiotek reference design SSD with Micron's 16nm and new 3D TLC using the MK8115 DRAMless controller.

Sk Hynix begins mass production of new 72-layer 3D NAND with 256Gbit capacity. The new memory will ship in a range of products including mobile, IoT, eMMC, and SSDs.

Samsung's new Pyeongtaek campus semiconductor fabrication line in South Korea begins shipping 4th generation NAND with 64-layers.

Toshiba and Western Digital made two big technology announcements this week. One company announced shipping 4-bit per cell QLC flash and the other touts 96-layer BiCS. The announcements come at a contentious time between the manufacturing partners.

Asus rounded out the 10GbE ecosystem today with a desktop add-in network interface card to go with the previously released xg-U2008 switch. For less than $100 you get massive bandwidth with priority queuing for enhanced gaming support.

Samsung ramps up 64-layer V-NAND flash production and prepares new memory products for the second half of 2017.

The SSD ship is sinking in an unparalleled way for modern technology. The NAND flash fabs have to tools to progress the technology in a meaningful way but chose to sell out early adapter for high profit margins and increased market share.

PCIe 4.0 is right around the corner, but the consortium will follow up with PCIe 5.0 in 2019. The news came to light today at the PCI-SIG Developers Conference in Santa Clara, CA. Users can expect a 4x increase over PCIe 3.0 shipping today.

Silicon Motion, Inc has the first PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 SSD on its roadmap. The technology will double existing PCIe 3.0 performance per lane. When available, the SM2264 should have a theoretical bandwidth of 64Gbps from its x4 configuration.

Every year at Computex Adata shows us stacks of new SSDs that will come to market over the next twelve months. As one of the few companies with the budget to work with every controller manufacturer we get all of the pitches down the middle of the plate.

Sk Hynix will not sit back quietly and let Toshiba and Micron take all of the headlines. The other South Korean fab will have 72 layers this year but has 96 and 128 layers coming after, with up to 1Tbit die capacity.

Plextor went all out in an event that spanned an afternoon at Computex 2017. We took part in the celebrity gaming event that followed the introduction of the M9Pe and official release of the M8Se that will hit store shelves this month.

GeIL launched its first NVMe SSD with the new Shuttle Series. The drive may not come to North America, but it will fly in Asia and surrounding regions, delivering 2,000 MB/s read and 1,000 MB/s write speeds.

Phison showed two reference designs at Computex 2017, one for inside the PC and one for the outside. The success of the S10 and E7 gave the company confidence to engineer outside the box.

MSI treats future desktop systems with a powerful dual NVMe SSD system that acts as an all-in-one cache plus hard disk drive for increasing application and gaming performance.