Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc., a committed technology leader, today announces the Toshiba OCZ RD400 Non-Volatile Memory Express® (NVMe) solid state drive (SSD) series. Designed for cutting-edge notebooks and PCs, the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express® (PCIe®) RD400 series provides improved storage bandwidth and enhanced latency resulting in a fast and responsive computing experience.

Unlike Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) based SSDs utilizing the legacy Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) protocol, NVMe is the first storage protocol designed with SSDs in mind making the RD400 series one of Toshiba’s fastest consumer SSDs to date. Additionally, the RD400’s PCIe Gen3 x4 lane interface shatters the traditional SATA bottleneck by delivering over four times the performance of SATA SSDs. The RD400 series features sequential read/write speeds of up to 2,600 MB/s and 1,600 MB/s and random read/write performance of up to 210,000 and 140,000 4KiB input/output operations per second (IOPS).

Integral Memory is first to market with a 256GB microSD card that offers a double portion of memory for storage hungry mobile devices. Recent generations of smartphones and tablets, demand increased capacity to save high-resolution photographs and video as well as to accommodate increasing numbers of app installs and music downloads. The arrival of the new generation of microSDXC cards is set to deliver twice the memory capacity and the fast speeds required to manage Full HD resolution files without the fear of ‘maxing out’. Smartphones and tablets fitted with the new 256GB capacity memory card can now accommodate 31 hours of Full HD footage or an equivalent 43,288 photographs, allowing consumers to worry less about running out of memory and to enjoy their devices more.

Integral have developed and performance tested their new microSD cards with Android and Windows smartphones and tablets in mind. These devices benefit from the flexibility and the lower costs that result from interchangeable memory cards.

The Integral Smartphone and Tablet memory card range of microSDHC and microSDXC cards are all fast Class 10, UHS-I Class 1 specification, with data transfer rates up to 90MB/s.

Verbatim introduces the new 100GB MDISC Blu-ray disc with an average lifetime of more than 1,000 years and high data storage capacity making it ideal for archiving. Most types of digital storage device are not designed to last beyond a decade.

Incorporating titanium for added longevity, the Verbatim MDISC Blu-ray disc preserves stored data by engraving the information into a ‘rock-like’ recording layer resistant to light, temperature, and humidity. Museums, libraries and archiving institutions are already taking advantage of the protective benefits of the MDISC archival-grade technology developed by Millenniata Inc.

Verbatim’s MDISC Blu-ray disc is compatible with any BDXL capable Blu-ray drive. Virtually all Blu-ray writers and players manufactured within the last 18 months are compatible with BDXL.

Synology Inc. today launched DS916+, a 4-bay scalable NAS designed for professionals and growing businesses. Powered by a quad-core CPU, DS916+ performs high-speed computing and data encryption tasks. With flexible scalability up to 9 drives, DS916+ is able to handle rapidly growing storage capacity needs. Equipped with DiskStation Manager (DSM) 6.0 and versatile add-on packages, users are able to perform seamless file syncing and sharing, productive collaboration, and smooth disaster recovery on DS916+.

DS916+ delivers outstanding performance exceeding 225 MB/s reading and 221 MB/s writing. When transferring encrypted data, DS916+ also achieves 225 MB/s reading and 209 MB/s writing and can handle a wide range of computing tasks in a secured and robust working environment. DS916+ comes with two memory options, 2GB and 8GB for more flexibility in concurrent connections and virtualization.

Samsung Electronics, an expert provider of advanced memory solutions, today unveiled its newest memory card globally – the EVO Plus 256GB microSD card. The EVO Plus 256GB offers the highest capacity for a microSD card in its class, delivering fast speeds and an expanded memory storage for use in premium smartphones and tablets, 360-degree video recorders, action cameras, and drones. Consumers can now record up to 12 hours of 4K UHD video or 33 hours of Full HD video on their mobile device or action camera without needing to change or replace the memory card, allowing them to experience more and worry less about running out of memory.

The EVO Plus 256GB raises the bar for capacity and performance of microSD cards thanks to Samsung’s advanced V-NAND technology, offering high read and write speeds of up to 95MB/s and 90MB/s, respectively. This level of performance will provide general consumers and professionals with superb user convenience for storing heavy-loaded, high-resolution photography and 4K video recording, as well as graphic intensive multimedia like virtual reality (VR) and gaming.

I have bad news for those of that own one of SanDisk's Ultra +Cloud USB 3.0 flash drives. The company sent out an email earlier today, letting +Cloud customers know that the online storage service would not be available after Friday, May 13th.

Hi SanDisk +Cloud customer,

Unfortunately, the SanDisk +Cloud online storage service will no longer be available after Friday, May 13, 2016. You are receiving this message because your email address is listed as a registered user of this service. We very much regret and apologize for this disruption.

If you have data stored in your SanDisk +Cloud account, please download your data to a separate storage source before Friday, May 13, 2016, after which point it will no longer be available.  If you are having trouble retrieving your data, please contact our customer support team.

At this point, we're not really sure why SanDisk would shut down the service after only a few months. The company is trying to make it up to +Cloud users by providing them with a prepaid debit card to cover the cost of the product as well as a 128GB SanDisk Extreme PRO USB flash drive.

Update: We've learned that this is due to Bitcasa's decision to discontinue their Drive service, which was the basis for SanDisk's +Cloud service.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today announced the release of the powerful 8-bay business NAS TS-831X that features two built-in 10GbE SFP+ ports to fully support 10GbE high-speed networks as a cost-effective NAS solution. The TS-831X further supports VJBOD (Virtual JBOD) to introduce an economical way to utilize unused NAS storage space for expanding the storage capacity of other QNAP NAS. Taking advantage of TS-831X’s native support of Container Station, organizations can rapidly develop and deploy Internet of Things (IoT) apps to create more business opportunities.

The TS-831X uses an Annapurna Labs Alpine AL-314 quad-core 1.4 GHz ARM® Cortex-A15 processor, and features 8GB/16GB DDR3 RAM (upgradable to 16GB), RAID 5/6 support, hardware-accelerated encryption and an SSD cache. It is 10GbE-ready with two built-in 10GbE SFP+ ports, and allows users to install a third 10GbE port via the extra PCIe slot for flexible high-speed network deployment.