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.”

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.”

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.

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.