Japanese storage vendor Fixstars launches what it says is its highest density 2.5-inch SSD-- the 3TB SSD-3000M, as well as the 1TB SSD-1000M, two storage products designed for enterprise storage applications.

According to the company the SSD-3000M offers the highest capacity for a 2.5-inch SATA SSD, thus reducing the number of drives required in professional setups. The drives also feature a proprietary Fixstar NAND controller to prevent latency spikes and performance deterioration, making them ideal for encrypted storage and use with 4K video recording and editing.

Toshiba launches the Encrypted USB Flash Drive-- a self-explanatory device armed with hardware-based encryption to provide customers with military-grade AES 256-bit security for their sensitive files.

Designed for both security-minded enterprise customers, the Encrypted USB Flash Drive carries a built-in mini-keyboard for users to input a PIN before plugging into a USB port. Once unlocked, the drive permits access to all content, and once removed it automatically re-locks and encrypts the stored media.

A further security addition is a brute force hack mechanism-- the drive renders all stored data unreadable after 10 consecutive unsuccessful attempts at PIN entry.

Dell says the SC4020 all flash storage array (AFA) makes an "economical starting point" for customers wanting all-flash performance with support for a variety of applications and workloads.

It is newly available in two configurations-- entry-level single-tier with six read-intensive 480GB SSDs (2.8TB total capacity) or multi-tier with six 480GB read-intensive SSDs plus six write-intensive 200GB SSDs for a total of 4TB capacity.

The SC4020 comes as a a 2U rack-mount array holding up to 24 drives for a capacity of over 400tB. It supports both HDDs and SSDs, while the dual controller handles both fibre channel and iSCSI host connectivity.

According to IDC 2014 is a year of "explosive growth" for flash-based arrays, as the 2014 global market for all-flash arrays (AFAs) and hybrid flash arrays (HFAs) is worth $11.3 billion.

HFA revenues total $10bn in 2014, while the AFA segment makes $1.3bn. Once the niche of storage startups, datacentre flash now drives sales for the big industry boys, including the likes of Dell, EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, NetApp and Oracle.

"Vendors are aggressively flash optimising their offerings to provide improved performance, longer endurance, higher reliability, and a lower effective cost per gigabyte," the analyst says. "The most successful vendors will be those that can make a smooth transition from the traditional, dedicated application model to mixed workload consolidation."