Western Digital Corp. today announced successful development of its second-generation, four-bits-per-cell architecture for 3D NAND. Implemented for the company’s 96-layer BiCS4 device, the QLC technology delivers the industry’s highest 3D NAND storage capacity of 1.33 terabits (Tb) in a single chip. BiCS4 was developed at the joint venture flash manufacturing facility in Yokkaichi, Japan with our partner Toshiba Memory Corporation. It is sampling now and volume shipments are expected to commence this calendar year beginning with consumer products marketed under the SanDisk brand. The company expects to deploy BiCS4 in a wide variety of applications from retail to enterprise SSDs.

“Leveraging Western Digital’s silicon processing, device engineering and system integration capabilities, the QLC technology allows 16 distinct levels to be sensed and utilized for storing data,” said Dr. Siva Sivaram, executive vice president, Silicon Technology and Manufacturing at Western Digital. “BiCS4 QLC is our second generation four-bits-per-cell device, and it builds on the learnings from our QLC implementation in 64-layer BiCS3. With the best intrinsic cost structure of any NAND product, BiCS4 underscores our strengths in developing flash innovations that allow our customers’ data to thrive across retail, mobile, embedded, client and enterprise environments. We expect the four-bits-per-cell technology will find mainstream use in all these applications.”

Pioneer Japan sent out a press release this morning, announcing two new commercial-grade Blu-ray Disc writers. Designed for the long-term preservation of electronic data, the BDR-PR1MC-W and BDR-PR1MA-W are certified by JIIMA (Japan Information Technology Association of Public Interest Corporation) and are capable of writing to BD-R, BD-R DL, BD-R TL (100GB) and BD-R QL (128GB) at 4x. The two drives are also compatible with Sony's long-term, 128GB BD-R media that will be available in late July. 

The main difference between the two is that the BDR-PR1MA-W can be used to check the recording quality of a disc. Using Pioneer's Error Rate Utility, the drive is able to measure the RSER (Random Symbol Error Rate) as well as the number of burst and uncorrectable errors on recordable Blu-ray media. In addition, the BDR-PR1MA-W can be used to measure PIE/POF on DVDs and BLER/CU on CDs.

Following the releases of the TS-932X (powered by an AnnapurnaLabs CPU) and the TS-963X (powered by an AMD CPU), QNAP Systems, Inc. today completes the high-capacity-compact-size 9-bay NAS lineup with the introduction of the TVS-951X 10GbE multimedia NAS. The new model is powered by a 7th-generation Intel® Kaby Lake processor, providing a NAS private cloud solution that combines high capacity and 10GbE high-speed connectivity. The TVS-951X NAS has also won the Red Dot Award (2018) and Computex d&i Award for high-quality product design.

Powered by a 7th-generation Kaby Lake 14nm Intel® Celeron® 3865U low-power dual-core 1.8 GHz processor, the TVS-951X features a hybrid drive bay design (including five 3.5-inch drive bays and four 2.5-inch SSD slots) with built-in 10GBASE-T (10G/5G/2.5G/1G/100M) network port. Combining hard drives and SSDs allow users to maximize both capacity and performance with SSD caching and Qtier auto-tiering storage. Combined with 10GbE connectivity, multimedia transcoding/streaming, and 4K HDMI output, the TVS-951X provides users with a cost-effective, highly-efficient, and high-performance NAS solution with feature-rich multimedia applications.

ASUSTOR Inc. today released two new NAS models, the AS3102T v2 and AS3204T v2, which improve on the previous design of multimedia NAS, The AS3102T and AS3204T. The AS3102T v2 and AS3204T v2 are equipped with two Gigabit Ethernet ports, allowing the use of network aggregation settings to double the network performance of the NAS. Increasing the amount of Ethernet ports allows hard drives to make better use of their rated speed for those who need it, such as those in the AV industry. Our new models also support the Intel AES-NI instruction set, which increases encryption and decryption performance using the CPU. Large amounts of data can now be encrypted far more quickly and helps increase data security and efficiency for storage, backup, and remote access.

ASUSTOR product manager Johnny Chen said: "The AS3102T v2 and AS3204T v2 integrate business-quality hardware into an affordable NAS to help increase performance and reliability. Since some higher capacity drives contained only four screw holes, we have redesigned the hard drive bays to be compatible with drives that feature four or six screw holes, greatly increasing the flexibility of an ASUSTOR NAS. Therefore, those who need high performance and high storage capacity, the AS3102T v2 and AS3204T v2 are the best choices."

CDRLabs has taken a long overdue look at Samsung's latest SATA SSD, the 860 PRO. Designed to meet the needs of creators, professionals, and gamers, the 860 PRO is powered by Samsung's new MJX controller and is available with up to 4TB of their latest 2-bit MLC V-NAND flash. This combination not only delivers industry-leading performance, it gives the drive an endurance rating that is up to 8x higher than its predecessor, the 850 PRO. The 860 PRO also supports AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption and is compliant with TCG Opal and IEEE 1667. To top it all off, it comes with Samsung's Magician software and can be used with their RAPID technology. 

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has begun mass producing its fifth-generation V-NAND memory chips with the fastest data transfers now available. In the industry’s first use of the ‘Toggle DDR 4.0’ interface, the speed for transmitting data between storage and memory over Samsung’s new 256-gigabit (Gb) V-NAND has reached 1.4-gigabits per second (Gbps), a 40-percent increase from its 64-layer predecessor.

The energy efficiency of Samsung’s new V-NAND remains comparable to that of the 64-layer chip, primarily because the operating voltage has been reduced from 1.8 volts to 1.2 volts. The new V-NAND also has the fastest data write speed to date at 500-microseconds (μs), which represents about a 30-percent improvement over the write speed of the previous generation, while the response time to read-signals has been significantly reduced to 50μs.

ASUSTOR Inc. has announced today that two new NAS devices will be joining the ASUSTOR family. The AS4002T and AS4004T are our first consumer NAS that integrate 10gb Ethernet with an RJ45 connector. The AS4002T and AS4004T are the world's first NAS containing a Marvell Armada Cortex-A72 64-bit dual-core processor. Compared with the previous generation of processors, these NAS offer 3½ times more computing power. 2GB of DDR4-2400 memory is also included, which is faster and more efficient than DDR3. Both the AS4002T and AS4004T have a 10gb Ethernet port and two Gigabit Ethernet ports, which create a fast networking environment that is 10 times faster than a Gigabit network. Network aggregation technology can also be used to combine the three RJ45 ports to triple the speed of a gigabit connection without 10gb hardware

The new AS4002T and AS4004T come with a brand new appearance. The front panel is a removable crystal black magnetic panel, which is not only aesthetically pleasing but also dust-proof. Actuated inlets are arranged around the panel to optimize heat transfer, while the inner honeycomb structure strengthens the pressure area to avoid damaging hard drives from external impact. In addition, both models support hot-swapping hard drives. The hard disk is fully secured using the caddy, and the hard drives can be quickly installed or replaced without any tools.