Seagate Technology plc, a world leader in storage solutions, today announced the launch of the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim, the world’s thinnest 2TB mobile hard drive. This new product builds on the award-winning Backup Plus Slim drive, delivering a stunning new design with the same leading capacity in an even slimmer profile. The Backup Plus Ultra Slim also includes 200GB of Microsoft OneDrive® cloud storage and Lyve® software compatibility, so users can back up, access and share their favorite files from any device or location.

“The launch of the Backup Plus Ultra Slim builds on Seagate’s rich history of award-winning innovation to give users even more capacity in an incredibly small form factor,” said Tim Bucher, vice president for Seagate’s Consumer Group. “Based on our breakthrough ultra-mobile hard drive technology, this new storage solution gives them a better way to manage the increase in both data volumes and number of devices.”

Transcend Information, Inc. (Transcend), a leading manufacturer of industrial-grade products, is proud to announce its newly developed SuperMLC technology featuring a cost effective solution yet with nearly equivalent performance to SLC NAND flash. By adjusting firmware coding and preselecting high quality flash chips, Transcend has successfully developed SuperMLC technology that breaks through the performance bottleneck in small capacity SSD to reach 4 times of sequential write than MLC NAND flash and up to 30,000 times of P/E cycles. Upcoming in 2016, Transcend plans to release brand new industrial-grade SSD models embedded with SuperMLC technology, offering industrial enterprises ideal alternative to SLC-based solutions for superior quality at affordable prices.

Transcend Exclusive SuperMLC Technology
Between Single-Level Cell (SLC) and Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND flash, Transcend has successfully developed SuperMLC technology by reprogramming the two bits per cell of MLC into one bit per cell to greatly boost its performance and endurance, especially in small capacity SSD. The sequential write speed can reach up to 4 times faster than MLC flash chips and provides up to 30,000 times of P/E cycles. SuperMLC technology offers better reliability and endurance than MLC flash chips though this practice halves capacity considering the double occupation of cells for two bits. It is still a good tradeoff for industrial enterprises to obtain superior quality that is nearly equivalent to SLC NAND flash at the most cost-effective price. Transcend SSDs with SuperMLC technology aim at industrial-grade applications, such as embedded automation computers, engineering machines and fanless PCs.

Samsung Electronics America, Inc., today announced the Samsung Portable SSD T3, a premium, palm-sized, external solid state drive (SSD) that offers multi-terabyte (TB) storage capacity. Equipped with Samsung’s proprietary Vertical NAND (V-NAND) and SSD TurboWrite technology, the T3 drive provides advanced performance, enabling consumers, content creators, business and IT professionals, to quickly and easily store and transfer large multimedia content across a variety of devices.

“Following the successful worldwide launch of the Portable SSD T1 in 2015, we made several significant upgrades to the T3 based on the feedback and needs of our customers, which included content creators and business professionals in particular,” said Un-Soo Kim, Senior Vice President of Brand Product Marketing, Memory Business at Samsung Electronics. “As such, the T3 delivers the outstanding performance, storage capacity and durability needed from an external storage device for today’s mobile lifestyle, without compromising on style or security. It’s the new portable external storage drive users can depend on in any situation or environment.” 

CDRLabs has taken an in depth look at Plextor's new M6V SSD. This mainstream SSD is powered by Silicon Motion's SM2246EN controller and is equipped with Toshiba's 15nm Toggle Mode MLC NAND to provide up to 535 MB/s read and 455 MB/s write speeds. The M6V also features Plextor's exclusive PlexTurbo smart caching technology, which uses system RAM to extend the drive's lifespan and push its performance beyond the bandwidth limitations of the SATA interface.