SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash storage solutions, today entered the portable SSD market with a family of high-performance drives, including the SanDisk Extreme 900 Portable SSDs, the world’s fastest line of Type C-based portable SSDs; and the SanDisk Extreme 500 Portable SSDs, the company’s new pocket-sized, rugged drives. The SanDisk Extreme 900 drives feature speeds of up to nine times faster than a portable hard drive, while the SanDisk Extreme 500 drives offer speeds up to four times faster. These powerful solutions are ideal for photographers, videographers, creative professionals and tech enthusiasts looking to move massive files at phenomenal speeds, helping them save time and simplify work processes at the office or out in the field.

“As a recognized leader in developing solutions for professional photographers and videographers, we designed this game-changing family of offerings to provide our customers with even greater speeds and capacities to keep up with rapidly increasing demands for high-quality content,” said Dinesh Bahal, vice president, product marketing, SanDisk. “Whether a professional or amateur, this level of portability, speed and capacity is exceptional, and we believe it will transform the way people create and produce high quality video content—ultimately saving them time and money.”

QNAP Systems, Inc. continues its partnership with Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) to announce the 5-bay TS-563 Turbo NAS. With an AMD Embedded G-Series quad-core 2.0GHz SoC processor and up to 16GB RAM, the TS-563 features AES-NI hardware-accelerated encryption, SSD cache acceleration, AMD-V virtualization, and optional 10GbE connectivity that allows small and medium businesses to build private clouds suitable for high-speed networks and application-intensive environments. The TS-563 is available at a budget price to maximize ROI and will be showcased at Computex Taipei 2015.

“The TS-563 is our most affordable 10GbE-ready quad-core NAS with hardware-accelerated encryption and virtual machine support. It is a fast and scalable NAS solution designed for optimizing business applications and satisfying quickly-growing data storage needs while providing 10GbE readiness for budget-conscious organizations and professionals,” said Jason Hsu, product manager of QNAP.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today released the quad-core TS-453mini, a 4-bay vertical NAS that suits non-spacious office environments. Featuring a stylish glossy look, easy tool-less hard drive installation, simple RAM upgrade design, a quiet exhaust for heat dissipation and LED indicators with adjustable brightness controls, the elegant TS-453mini is packed full of cutting-edge features and apps to provide day-to-day file storage, backup, sharing, synchronization and entertainment needs.

“The space-efficient vertical design and streamlined architecture with HDMI installation for easier NAS setup demonstrates our attention to deliver a better user experience for the desktop environment,” said Jason Hsu, product manager of QNAP. The TS-453mini includes numerous innovative designs in its hardware architecture, including a quiet internal compact exhaust that helps dissipate heat and reduce dust buildup, a tool-less design allowing users to easily remove the magnetic top cover to add/replace hot-swappable 3.5” hard drives, and a conveniently accessible cover at the bottom for upgrading the RAM with minimal effort. Users can easily install their NAS over HDMI, allowing for a NAS to be installed without a network connection, and free from complicated procedures and the need for network expertise.

WD, a Western Digital company, and world leader in storage solutions, today introduced the new, redesigned My Passport Ultra portable hard drives and My Passport for Mac drives. With the My Passport line now in its 7th generation, the My Passport Ultra and My Passport for Mac portable hard drives are now available in capacities up to 3 TB and in four stylish colors - Classic Black, Brilliant White, Wild Berry and Noble Blue. WD is also introducing a new optional accessory – WD Grip Pack – a soft band, available in a variety of colors, which encircles the drive, offering consumers an easy way to personalize their My Passport drives.

“With more photos being taken than ever before, it’s critical to have a high capacity, reliable external storage solution that you can carry everywhere,” said Tony Tate, general manager and vice president of Content Storage Solutions at WD. “The latest generation My Passport drives deliver an easier automatic back-up experience, hardware-based encryption for security and higher capacities than ever before. Consumers can keep all their content in their pockets, while expressing their personal styles with the colors and WD Grip Pack.”

CDRLabs has taken an in depth look at OCZ's new Vector 180 SSD. Continuing the Vector’s legacy, the Vector 180 is optimized for hardcore gaming and data-intensive applications thanks to its powerful OCZ Barefoot 3 controller. This cutting-edge controller is powered by both an ARM Cortex processor and OCZ's own Aragon co-processor and features an advanced, multi-level ECC engine, low write amplification, efficient garbage collection and adaptive flash management algorithms. The Vector 180 also adds support for OCZ's Power Failure Management Plus (PFM+) technology and is equipped with up to 960GB of Toshiba's latest Advanced 19nm (A19) MLC NAND flash. Along with 50GB of host writes per day, the drive is capable of 550MB/s read and 530MB/s write speeds and a maximum of 95,000 4KB random write IOPS.

SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash storage solutions, today introduced the new SanDisk Z400s SSD, a cost effective solid-state drive (SSD) designed to replace hard-disk drives (HDDs) in computing platforms and embedded applications. PCs and embedded systems need consistent, reliable access to storage in order to meet business demands. The Z400s outperforms HDDs by 20x, while providing 5x the reliability with 20x lower average power consumption, all at a price point on par with HDDs. The SanDisk Z400s SSD joins the company’s existing portfolio of flash-based solutions that are designed to deliver a delightful user experience and reliability at an affordable price point.

“The Z400s represents a feat of engineering that addresses the needs of two distinct markets—PC OEM manufacturers and embedded application designers,” said Rizwan Ahmed, senior director of product marketing, client platform solutions, SanDisk. “With a single architecture, SanDisk is able to provide OEMs with an affordable solution for displacing HDDs in today’s cutting edge consumer devices, and help embedded application designers avoid overpaying for un-needed space—all while delivering the peak performance and high-reliability that only SSDs can supply.”

OCZ Storage Solutions -- a Toshiba Group Company and leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced its Z-Drive 6000 SSD Series that combines PCI Express (PCIe) Gen 3 and Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) technologies with an extensive enterprise feature-set and robust endurance and reliability. The NVMe-compliant Z-Drive 6000 Series is available in multiple configurations supporting a variety of form factors, capacity points, and endurance ratings.

The NVMe specification extends traditional PCIe flash storage to new levels and was architected from the ground up to enable specific benefits of non-volatile memory-based solid-state storage. It features a streamlined memory interface, command set and queue design that delivers faster access to critical data and highly resilient storage capabilities. This enables both system builders and storage vendors alike to develop different parts of a storage ecosystem to a standard specification with broad interoperability support between storage devices, host platforms and software. NVMe is expected to open new opportunities for faster, better and stronger flash-based storage applications while significantly improving PCIe SSD deployments over the next five years.