Transcend Information, Inc. (Transcend), a leading manufacturer of storage and multimedia products, is proud to announce the launch of a brand new SSD with built-in 3D NAND flash. With the growing needs for high-capacity and high-performance storage, Transcend has adopted 3D NAND flash technology for its 2.5” SSD230 solid state drives, boosting storage capacity, transfer rates, and reliability all at once.

3D NAND Flash Technology for Upgraded Capacity, Performance, and Endurance
To achieve higher densities, 2D planar NAND flash technology shrinks each memory cell onto a single layer of cells. However, this technology increases cell-to-cell interference and hence reduces reliability as it approaches its physical scaling limit. 3D NAND flash was developed to resolve this bottleneck, as it features multiple layers of memory cells stacked vertically. 3D NAND flash not only resolves the density limitations of 2D horizontal NAND, but also boosts read and write performance, as it does not require the invocation of algorithms to prevent data corruption. Free from cell-to-cell interference, state-of-the art 3D NAND flash technology also features higher endurance and lower power consumption.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today released the TS-x31P NAS series, including the TS-131P, TS-231P, and TS-431P. Powered by an AnnapurnaLabs, an Amazon company Alpine AL-212 dual-core 1.7GHz processor, this series provides a high-performance and secure private cloud NAS solution tailored for home, SOHO and workgroup users. In addition to basic requirements such as file storage, sharing and backup, the TS-x31P series supports value-added cloud-based note-taking app, centralized email account management, contacts management, and abundant multimedia applications.

"A cost-efficient and reliable NAS solution is undoubtedly a key investment for small businesses and organizations to improve workflow efficiency; whereas home users generally like simple and practical storage devices with real-time data accessibility that helps create a modern digital home," said Dan Lin, Product Manager of QNAP. "The TS-x31P is designed to fulfill such user needs to ensure data security and to bring a comprehensive business and multimedia experience," added Lin.

Seagate Technology plc, a world leader in storage solutions, today launched the industry’s fastest and highest-performing hard drive—the Seagate Enterprise Performance 15K HDD v6. Featuring capacities up to 900GB, the drive optimizes mission critical workloads by delivering the industry’s highest data performance (up to 315MB/s sustained transfer rate), enabling enterprise and cloud customers to move critical data where it’s needed fast to ensure smooth and seamless connected experiences for business, organization and consumer users—all while lowering total cost of ownership through high reliability, security and easy data center integration.

“Seagate is once again driving innovation to meet the needs of today’s data-driven economy,” said John Morris, vice president of global HDD products at Seagate. “Our new Enterprise Performance 15K HDD ensures that the data is secure, available on demand and always bringing more value to our customers. With Seagate’s broad portfolio of both HDDs and SSDs, we’re able to cover the full range of storage solutions, delivering high performance and capacity with affordable versatility to meet the needs of today’s and tomorrow’s data centers.”

“Performance demands on enterprise datacenters today are increasing as customers consider agile storage solutions to handle diverse workloads. The key to success is to apply the right technologies to the right workloads, and we are seeing increased adoption of hybrid arrays of HDDs and SSDs enhanced by software-based caching,” said Brian Payne, executive director, server solutions, Dell EMC. “By delivering higher performance and capacity, Seagate’s latest Enterprise Performance 15K HDD will be a sound investment for dynamic server-storage environments.”

CDRLabs kicks off the week with a review of Plextor's new S2C solid state drive. Targeted towards first time upgraders and do-it-yourselfers, this successor to the M7V is powered by SMI's SM2258 controller and is available with up to 512GB of SK Hynix's 16nm TLC NAND flash. To compensate for the slow write speeds typically associated with TLC NAND, the S2C is equipped with Plextor's PlexNitro cache acceleration technology, which optimizes performance without taking up any space on the drive. The S2C also has many of the same features found on Plextor's higher end SSDs. In addition to the company's PlexTurbo intelligent RAM caching solution, the drive offers support for its PlexCompressor and PlexVault technologies.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today announced the release of the TS-531X - a powerful 5-bay business NAS that features two integrated 10GbE SFP+ ports, providing a cost-effective NAS solution with 10GbE connectivity. The TS-531X features Container Station, allowing users to rapidly develop and deploy IoT (Internet of Things) applications and supports VJBOD (Virtual JBOD) as an economical method for expanding the capacity of other QNAP NAS using unused storage space. The TS-531X is a versatile NAS that satisfies small/medium businesses' demands for 10GbE connectivity, container virtualization, and storage expansion.

The TS-531X comes with an Annapurna Labs Alpine AL-341 quad-core 1.4 GHz processor by Amazon® and uses 2GB/8GB DDR3 RAM (upgradable to 16GB). Offering two 1GbE ports, two built-in 10GbE SFP+ ports and SATA 6Gb/s ports for HDDs and SSD, the TS-531X can reach up to 1723MB/s throughput speeds. The model also features a hardware-accelerated encryption engine and SSD cache support, ensuring security without compromising performance.

Plextor, the world's leading brand in high-performance digital storage devices, is announcing the S1 series; its last model in the MLC SSD product line. SSD nowadays is shifting from MLC to TLC flash memory; Plextor is no exception will fully adopt TLC lately. However there are some users who still prefer MLC SSDs, fortunately, Plextor now provide with the last chance to buy MLC SSDs - the S1 series.

Plextor’s S1 series will be sold only in Southeast Asia because of the limited quantities, and is designed with the best price-performance ratio in mind to meet the need of Southeast Asian Market. Sorry to other regions of the world, anyone who wants to get the MLC SSDs last-buy chance has to come to Southeast Asia.

If you're like me, you've probably been waiting in anticipation for the release of Samsung's new 960 PRO SSD. While we haven't gotten our hands on this V-NAND based, M.2 form factor SSD (yet), a number of other websites posted reviews of the 2TB version this morning. The price is quite high ($1300!!) as you can imagine, but with sequential read/write speeds of up to 3,500 MB/s and 2,100 MB/s, the 960 PRO looks like it will be the drive of choice for those requiring the best performance possible.