Items tagged with nand flash
Drive makers have gotten into the unfortunate habit of swapping out key components that can potentially affect the performance of any particular solid state drive model, which introduces a sort of luck-of-the-draw factor for the buyer. Western Digital recently did this with its value-oriented Blue SN550 NVMe SSD. After catching some heat, WD has promised to update the drive model whenever it does something similar in the future. As we noted in our WD Blue SN550 review, it is a superb option in the budget NVMe SSD sector. The drives are rated to reach 2,400MB/s of sequential read performance and 1,950MB/s of sequential write performance, both of which run circles around what you can get on the...
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Predicting what will happen in the PC market, including supplementary components, sometimes feels a lot like throwing darts at a dartboard. Analysts do the best they can with the information available, but things have a tendency to turn on a dime. That said, one welcome trend we have seen is the continued drop in price for solid state drive (SSD) storage (without a shortage of drives), and there is reason to believe that further price cuts are around the corner. I am not sure storage makers see it as a welcome trend, but consumers sure do. This has made it easier than ever to consider an SSD in place of a mechanical hard disk drive (HDD)—even though the latter still offers a better price...
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Buying a solid state drive right now is not a bad idea, with all of the Prime Day deals happening (at Amazon and other retailers as well). But if you decide to wait a bit, you might be rewarded with even lower prices. Same goes for RAM. A continued oversupply of memory chips is the reason, with average selling prices (ASPs) predicted to decline even further this quarter. This is good news for consumers. We have already seem RAM and SSD prices come down quite a bit over the past year or so, in what has been a somewhat volatile market. If you are building a PC today (or soon), it is completely feasible to splurge on a 32GB DDR4 memory kit and a fast 1TB NVMe SSD without taking out a second mortgage....
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NAND flash helps to make our [electronic] world go 'round and 'round. NAND flash is used in everything from our smartphones to our tablets to our notebook computers to numerous IoT devices that float in and out of our everyday lives. For the past year, demand has outstripped supply with regards to NAND flash, which has resulted in higher prices. However, DRAMeXchange is forecasting that that trajectory is set to change during the first quarter of 2018. The fourth quarter is traditionally the hottest selling period in tech, while the first quarter is traditionally one of the slowest periods. Thanks to increased production and the seasonal downturn, DRAMeXchange estimates that overall demand will...
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The $999 iPhone X isn't the only Apple product that gave consumer sticker shock when it was announced yesterday; the company also took the highly unusual step of actually raising the price on one of its popular product lines. In this case, the unlucky target was the iPad Pro, which is available in both 10.5- and 12.9-inch form-factors. Apple of course wasn't going to announced the bad news during its keynote, so it took a keen observer, MacRumors, to spot that 256GB and 512GB versions of the iPad Pro are now $50 more expensive. It doesn't matter if you choose the Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi+LTE models; the $50 price hike is now in effect across all color variations. The only members of the iPad Pro family...
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If you notice that solid state drives are getting more expensive, blame smartphones, at least in part. Smartphone makers are drying up the supply of NAND flash memory chips and to make matters worse, the transition from 2D NAND to 3D NAND manufacturing is putting added strain on how the overall output of chips. There just isn't a big enough supply to meet demand. We all know what happens when demand exceeds supply—prices go up. The latest report from market observer DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, notes that the global NAND flash industry grew nearly 20 percent in the third quarter compared to the previous one. "The NAND Flash market outlook for the fourth quarter of 2016 indicates that...
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Researchers at MIT have come up with a new network design that exploits cheap, power-efficient flash memory without sacrificing the speed that supercomputing applications enjoy from Random Access Memory (RAM). What's appealing about the development is that flash memory is about ten times less expensive than RAM and consumes about a tenth as much power. The downside is that flash memory is only about a tenth as fast, though by utilizing MIT's new system, several common big data applications could use flash memory just as efficiently as conventional RAM. Not only that, the researchers presented evidence at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture that if servers executing a distributed...
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Digital photos and videos aren't consuming any less space these days, and as 4K recording grows in popularity, so too will our storage needs. Luckily Samsung is on top of things on the mobile front -- the company today announced that it's now mass producing the industry's first 128GB ultra-fast embedded memory based on the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 2.0 standard for tomorrow's flagship handsets. Not only will this lead to larger capacity smartphones, it will also improve performance on storage side chores. UFS memory utilizes "Command Queue," a technology that boosts the speed of command execution in SSDs through a serial interface to significantly increase data processing speeds compared...
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