Photo: Andrew Liszewski - Gizmodo
Technology gets faster, cheaper, and more capacious year after year, but every once in a while it still manages to catch you by surprise. It wasn’t too long ago that 4TB of storage required a RAID enclosure claiming a corner of your desk, but Crucial’s new X6 4TB portable SSD packs that much storage into a palm-sized drive that doesn’t seem like it should actually exist.
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Big bumps in storage capacities always come with a premium price tag at launch, and Crucial’s new X6 4TB SSD is going to set you back $490 if you run out and buy one right now. By comparison, you can get a 4TB portable hard drive right now for about $90 if you find a deal. (Good news they always seem to be on sale.)
Photo: Joanna Nelius/Gizmodo
A PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD is the newer and faster sibling to the gum stick-sized SSD you probably have in your computer right now, and with new options from AMD, Intel, and Sony, we now have more reasons to upgrade.
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PCIe 4.0 is roughly twice as fast as PCI 3.0. Many PCIe 3.0 SSDs top out at 3500 MB/s, while PCIe 4.0 can hit 5000 MB/s or higher. PCIe 4.0 can handle double the amount of bandwidth as PCIe 3.0 32 GB/s versus 16 GB/s which can help decrease game loading times or reduce how long it takes to transfer files between drives. It’s one of the simplest upgrades you can do to give a speed bump to your PC, laptop, and soon your PS5.
Storage solutions major Western Digital on Monday launched its two new SanDisk portable SSDs that aim to offer nearly 2x the speed over previous generations. According to the company, the SanDisk Extreme and SanDisk Extreme PRO portable SSDs are purpose-built to keep up with today s high-quality content demands. The SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD is available now in 500GB for Rs 7,999, 1TB at Rs 12,999 and 2TB for Rs 27,499, with the 4TB model shipping later in April 2021. Meanwhile, the SanDisk Extreme PRO portable SSD is available now in 1TB Rs 19,999 and 2TB for Rs 34,999 with 4TB model shipping in April 2021. With the new range of SSDs in the segment, we have bumped up the speeds with the latest NVMe technology and used robust materials in our designs to make the devices look trendy while being rugged enough to help back up heavy files safely, Khalid Wani, Director Sales, India, Western Digital, said in a statement.
Despite revenue decline, Samsung Electronics has further upped its leadership in the global NAND flash market in the fourth quarter of 2020, a report showed on Wednesday. The South Korean tech giant, also the leader in the DRAM sector, had a 32.9 per cent share of the global NAND flash market in terms of revenue in the October-December period, up 1.5 percentage points from a quarter earlier, according to market tracker TrendForce. But Samsung s revenue from NAND flash products came to a total of US$4.64 billion in the last three months of 2020, down 3.4 per cent from a quarter earlier. Samsung s NAND flash bit shipments rose by 7-9 per cent quarter-on-quarter on strong procurements from the smartphone and PC segments, according to TrendForce, but its average selling price (ASP) of NAND flash products declined by more than 10 percent from the previous quarter.