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.

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.

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.

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.