Samsung launches a 3rd generation of NVMe SSDs-- the 970 PRO and EVO, aimed at the professional and enthusiast markets with higher performance through the PCIe gen 3x4 interface.

“Samsung has led the NVMe SSD industry since its inception, and the company continues to define the latest standards of consumer storage with unprecedented performance of the 970 PRO and EVO SSDs,” the company says. “The 970 series sets a new bar in all aspects for the NVMe SSD market with groundbreaking performance, superior reliability and best-in-class capacity.”

Based on the M.2 form factor, the 970 series promises "unparalleled performance" in data-intensive tasks such as 3D, 4K graphics, high-end games and data analytics. The PRO offers sequential read speeds of up to 3500MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 2700MB/s, while the EVO offer read reaching 3500MB/s and sequential write of up to 2500MB/s.

Storage specialist OWC launches the ThunderBlade-- an external SSD range the company claims is the fastest around, with transfer speeds reaching up to 2800MB/s read and 2450MB/s write.

Aimed primarily at video and media professionals working with large amounts of data, ThunderBlade devices are based on four Mercury M.2 SSDs (Silicon Motion SM2260, LDPC, 3D MLC NAND) working in concert. Connectivity comes through Thunderbolt 3 interface, allowing customers to daisychain up to x6 ThunderBlade drives for a maximum of 48TB of solid state storage.

The Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit 2018 sees Seagate demonstrate the Exos X14-- a helium-based 14TB enterprise HDD promising "the industry’s lowest power consumption, smallest footprint and best performance in its class."

The Exos X14 comes in the standard 3.5-inch format and features "Mach.2," an actuator technology allowing it to reach 480MB/s of sequential throughput. Recording comes through Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR), a technology using tiny lasers to heat the recording surface to over 400°C for a split second. It allows for increasingly dense recording capacity, if with some endurance and reliability concerns. However Seagate insists its HAMR implementation is more than reliable, allowing for 6000 hours of data transfers (or over 3.2 petabytes of data).

Microsoft takes to the Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit 2018 to announce Project Denali-- a specification to standardised SSD firmware interfaces when used in large-scale datacentres.

As the company puts it, "Project Denali drives provide the flexibility needed to optimise for the workloads of a wide variety of cloud applications, the simplicity to keep pace with rapid innovations in NAND flash memory and application design, and the scale required for multitenant hardware that is so common in the cloud."