Samsung Announces 8tb Consumer SSD

Samsung has announced a consumer-grade 8tb SSD drive.

One of the issues with these is that these are QLC drives which generally have much lower lifespans when being rewritten. This drive appears to be no different,

And before you ask: it should last a long time before losing its write ability despite the quad-level cell flash memory. The 8TB model is rated for an endurance rating of up to 2,880 terabytes written. You’d have to completely rewrite the drive 360 times before running into trouble, to put it another way. That 360-times endurance applies to lower-capacity models as well.

With all due respect to Engadget, who wrote the above, that’s not a lot of rewrites for a drive that’s likely to come in at $1,000.

Hopefully in a few years, the cost of these will come down to the point where it makes sense to throw large large numbers of them in a NAS for a low power, high speed (compared to spinning rust) data storage.

Seagate Is Shipping 16TB Hard Drives

According to Anandtech,

Continuing the march of progress in the HDD industry, Seagate has revealed that they have started shipping their 16 TB PMR hard drives. In a quarterly earnings call last week, the company reported that the drives have been shipping since late March, with current shipments coming ahead of high volume production of the drives. Seagate in turn expects to kick off mass production in the second half of 2019, and by Q2 2020 the new 16 TB drives will be its highest revenue SKU. What is particularly noteworthy here, besides the capacity of course, is that these drives do not use next-generation heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. Instead, they’re based around conventional magentic recoding (which is a new way to call perpendicular magnetic recording, PMR), which is being boosted by two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR).

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For a number of years Seagate has implied that HAMR will be first used for 16 TB drives, so the unexpected shift to CMR + TDMR raises several question about the the state of the market and the technology. Is the delay client-driven, with the company’s clients wanting to stick to proven technologies for another round? Or, since HAMR HDDs use different components (new media, new heads, etc.), do the manufacturing costs of HAMR hard drives present a hurdle to manufacturing and/or client adoption? Or is the change in plans due to something else entirely?

SanDisk announces 1TB MicroSD Card

At MWC 2019, SanDisk announced that it will be releasing a 1TB MicroSD card in April 2019. The 1TB card will retail for $449.99.

I thought I had a lot of storage with my 512gb Note9 with a Samsung 400gb MicroSD card, but with the Note 10 likely to offer a 1TB storage option (as the S10+ does), 2TB of phone storage is right around the corner.

(And just in the nick of time in my case.)

SanDisk 1TB MicroSD
SanDisk 1TB MicroSD

Samsung/Lexar Close to Releasing Their 512gb MicroSD Cards

A few days ago, Samsung’s Germany website published images of its new line of EVO Plus MicroSD cards which included a 512gb card. Today, AnandTech reported that Lexar announced its 512gb MicroSD card, which also meets the A2 Application Performance Class standard.

Retail price for these cards is likely to be in the $300-$330 range. Personally, I’m looking forward to throwing one of these into my Galaxy Note 9 so I can up my total phone storage up to 1TB (also, my 400gb Samsung MicroSD card only has about 14gb free).

Here’s hoping that these hit Amazon before the end of 2018.