Western Digital’s Ultrastar DC ZN540 Is the World’s First ZNS SSD

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom’s Hardware: Western Digital is one of the most vocal proponents of the Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) storage initiative, so it is not surprising that the company this week became the first SSD maker to start sampling of a ZNS SSD. When used properly, the Ultrastar DC ZN540 drive can replace up to four conventional…

SSDs Are Primed To Get Bigger and Faster With Micron’s New NAND Memory Tech

Micron has announced it’s shipping 176-layer TLC NAND flash memory to customers, a move that portends larger, faster and even cheaper SSD drives for all. From a report: The company said its 5th-gen 3D NAND memory should put its density about 40 percent higher than its nearest competitors, which are using 128-layer NAND. Micron said read and write latencies are reduced…

Microsoft Testing Windows 10 Feature That’ll Detect If Your SSD Is Failing

Microsoft is testing a new feature for Windows 10 that will alert you if your SSD drive is failing. Microsoft is also testing an update to Your Phone that will allow it to work with multiple devices. PCWorld reports: Both features arrived as part of Windows 10 Insider Build 20226 for the Dev Channel, Microsoft’s laboratory for future features. The Dev…

Samsung’s Fast, PCIe 4.0-ready 980 Pro SSD Can Future-Proof Your PC Build

Samsung has unveiled its next high-performance NVMe 2280-sized M.2 drive, the 980 Pro. So far, it comes in three capacities shipping this month: 250GB for $89.99, 500GB for $149.99, and 1TB for $229.99. A 2TB model will arrive later this year, but Samsung didn’t share a price. From a report: The standout feature of this drive is its compatibility with M.2…

Synology Launches DiskStation DS1520+

Synology today added a new NAS to its lineup: “DiskStation DS1520+,” with five bays. It also has two NVMe PCIe SSD slots for cache. From a report: “Featuring the Intel Celeron Processor J4125, DS1520+ provides a performance boost that sees a 126 percent increase in website responsiveness and a 19.8 percent increase in compute-tasks. The DS1520+ provides dual M.2 2280 NVMe…

The Next Step In SSD Evolution: NVMe Zoned Namespaces Explained

FallOutBoyTonto writes: In June we saw an update to the NVMe standard. The update defines a software interface to assist in actually reading and writing to the drives in a way to which SSDs and NAND flash actually works. Instead of emulating the traditional block device model that SSDs inherited from hard drives and earlier storage technologies, the new NVMe Zoned…

Ask Slashdot: What Happened To Holographic Data Storage?

dryriver writes: In an episode of the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World broadcasted all the way back in 1984, a presenter shows hands-on how a laser hologram of a real-world object can be recorded onto a transparent plastic medium, erased again by heating the plastic with an electric current, and then re-recorded differently. The presenter states that computer scientists are very interested in…

Ask Slashdot: Are There Storage Devices With Hardware Compression Built In?

Slashdot reader dryriver writes:
Using a compressed disk drive or hard drive has been possible for decades now. But when you do this in software or the operating system, the CPU does the compressing and decompressing. Are there any hard drives or SSDs that can work compressed using their own built in hardware for this? I’m not talking about realtime video compression…

Samsung Announces Standards-Compliant Key-Value SSD Prototype

Samsung has announced a new prototype key-value SSD that is compatible with the first industry standard API for key-value storage devices. “Earlier this year, the Object Drives working group of Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) published version 1.0 of the Key Value Storage API Specification,” reports AnandTech. “Samsung has added support for this new API to their ongoing key-value SSD project.”…