Today at CES 2020 in Las Vegas, SK hynix Inc. announced two new PCIe NVMe SSD families. The new drives are the Platinum P31 and Gold P31 PCIe NVMe consumer Solid State Drives (SSDs). The new SSD families along with several of SK hynix products will be showcased at the company’s booth #13529 at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2020, which is being held from January 7th to 10th in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Today at CES 2020 in Las Vegas, Seagate Technology plc unveiled its new modular storage solution that is designed to manage enterprise, cloud, and edge data, Seagate Lyve Drive Mobile System. This new portfolio has several solutions form SD cards to larger mobile arrays so it can fit into just about any data workflow that needs it. The devices are said to be simple, secure, and efficient to “activate the datasphere” according to Seagate.

Today at CES 2020 in Las Vegas, Seagate Technology plc announced new drives for consumers. These including the gaming drives Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSD and the BarraCuda Fast SSD. The new drives are all about performance leveraging NVME and USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 for more speed.

Today at CES 2020 in Las Vegas, Micron Technology, Inc. announced it has been sampling DDR5 registered DIMMs, based on its 1znm process technology, with key industry partners. Micron has over 40 years of experience and expertise in developing memory technology. It’s release of DDR5 SDRAM portfolio will help raise the bar on performance and bring about new technologies in the new decade. 

In this week's abbreviated podcast, thanks to Tom's absence due to Spanish Fly poisoning, the team recounts the latest news and reviews highlighted by a few WD SSDs, NetApp ONTAP 9.7, and VMware closing the Pivotal deal. Kevin discusses his plans to procrastinate when it comes to racking Qumulo and Adam still hates baby Yoda for reasons unknown. Warning, podcast likely contains adult language.

Looking for a solid-state drive for your NAS system? The WD Red SA500 NAS SATA SSD is purpose-built for NAS with Western Digital 3D NAND. Offering endurance needed for 24/7 environments, reduced latency improving responsiveness for demanding applications, 2.5” and M.2 form factors, and capacities from 500GB up to 4TB. This drive is ideal for home and medium to large NAS environments with best use cases including OLTP databases, multi-user environments, photo rendering, 4K and 8K video editing, and virtualization. 

A couple of months ago, NetApp announced an update to its data management software, ONTAP, with version 9.7. ONTAP includes many enhancements, where NetApp put the focus on FabricPool (auto cloud tiering of cold data), new SAN offerings, new scale-out capabilities, data protection, and security. Also, beginning with this new version, ONTAP presents a redesigned ONTAP System Manager, simplifying ONTAP management with an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI). ONTAP 9.7 was announced on October 29, and it's been available to download from mid-November of 2019.

The ADATA XPG SPECTRIX S40G RGB is an M.2 SSD that is designed for those looking for performance at a good price as well as a little bit of Wow in their drive design. The S40G leverages an NVMe interface, as well as SLC caching and a DRAM buffer, for quoted speeds of 3.5GB/s read and 3GB/s write as well as throughput as his at 300K IOPS read and 240K IPS write. The drive is marketed toward gamers, PC enthusiasts, overclockers, and graphic professionals. 

Today, in a move that is not surprising, VMware, Inc. announced that it had completed its acquisition of Pivotal Software, Inc. Pivot’s stock will be removed from the NYSE as the company becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of VMware. Pivotal was acquired for roughly $2.7 billion. 

The WD Blue SN550 is the company’s newest mainstream NVMe SSD and successor to the SN500, which we reviewed earlier this year. The new WD drive is a consumer, entry-level drive all packed inside the small M.2 2280 form factor. This includes an in-house controller, firmware, and their latest 3D NAND. As such, this makes it ideal for PC users looking to improve overall system performance over traditional SATA SSDs and especially HDDs, for jobs including booting and application load speeds. It’s also perfect for those looking to move to an NVMe-based SSD at a very affordable cost.