Western Digital Is Buying SanDisk For $19 Billion

Western Digital recently announced that it is buying up data storage vendor SanDisk for $19 billion in cash and stocks. This merger is coming at a time when the IT industry is evolving at breakneck speeds and companies are looking for new ways to get in on trends like wearable tech, the Internet of Things, and cloud computing. As a result, there has been a wave of mergers and acquisitions along with an increase of investment activity in the data storage market.

Western Digital's acquisition of SanDisk comes right after the market's biggest acquisition ever, when Dell purchased EMC for $67 billion. That deal hit news outlets last week and, in addition, storage semiconductor maker PMC-Sierra has also received a number of bids to take it over while Unisplendor, who is owned by China's Tsinghua, agreed to buy 15% of Western Digital for $3.78 billion. Western Digital focuses mainly on hard disk drives (HDD) though it is facing an evolution in IT that is pushing companies towards addressing a changing set of requirements for both client and enterprise end customers.

Enterprises no longer have to rely entirely on tape drives for backups and hard drives for primary data. However, the do have to deal with higher speed requirements that come with applications like online transaction processing and big data analytics. Solid-state drives (SSD) are a vital piece of multi-faceted storage infrastructures whereas flash memory devices simply sit under DRAM as top-tier storage. Western Digital and SanDisk are both based in California and they are both heavily involved in different segments of the consumer data storage market. Western Digital offers desktop NAS drives while SanDisk operates as a leader in flash-based thumb drives and memory expansion cards.

Earlier in the year, SanDisk, which is also known for its SSDs for desktops and laptops, announced its very first lineup of pocket-sized, high-capacity external drives. This buyout of SanDisk gives Western Digital an instant position in the global, non-volatile NAND flash memory market, according to Research Vice President of IDC Jeff Janukowicz. "Additionally, the NAND industry is at an infection point as it transitions from planar to 3D technology and access to that technology was a key piece of the deal," Janukowicz stated. "Now, WD is positioned to address a much larger footprint in the storage industry."

Western Digital noted during its announcement of the deal that the combination will "enable it to vertically integrate into NAND, securing long-term access to solid state technology at lower cost." SanDisk as 27 years of experience in the NAND flash memory industry and recently announced a deal with Toshiba to manufacture the world's densest 3D NAND, which is a 48-layer, 32GB chip that offers twice the capacity of the next densest memory. Also during the announcement Western Digital also noted the 15-year partnership between SanDisk and Toshiba and stated that it expects that relationship to be "ongoing". According to the company, "The joint venture provides stable NAND supply at scale through a time-tested business model and extends across NVM technologies such as 3D NAND."

According to Gregory Wong, an Analyst with Forward Insights, this deal between Western Digital and SanDisk will allow WD to enter the consumer SSD and enterprise SATA SSD market. "WD wants SanDisk for the access to the flash. Their PC HDD business is declining due to the weak PC market but also because SSDs are encroaching that space," Wong added. "Without access to NAND flash at cost, it would've increasingly been difficult to compete with NAND players in the enterprise space."

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10TB SSDs Are No Longer A Dream But A Reality

Toshiba and Intel recently came out with a big announcement that is going to make flash memory devices and SSDs a whole lot cheaper. Both of the companies just announced new memory chips called "3D NAND" chips. These new chips are stacked in layers in order to hold more data than a standard single-plane chip that is generally used. Toshiba also said that they have created the very first 48 layer NAND chip with a 16GB capacity and way faster speeds and reliability. This doesn't come to any surprise, considering they were the first company to invent flash memory, and they created the world's smallest NAND cells at 15nm. The new products won't make their way into new devices for about a year, but they are already sending engineering samples to manufacturers.

Intel and their partner Micron are working on even bigger chips than Toshiba. They have their own 32 layer NAND chips that should see use in devices around the same time that the ones from Toshiba. So far they have a 32GB chip made and a 48GB version that is currently in development. Micron says that the chips could be used to make gum-stick sized M.2 PCIe SSDs up to 3.5TB in size and 2.5-inch SSDs with 10TB of capacity. Now that all of this is happening, it means that companies like Samsung are going to have some serious competition. They have been using the 3D NAND technology for quite some time, but Intel and Toshiba are doing it bigger, better, and cheaper.

No matter what, this is nothing but fantastic news for consumers everywhere!

Source found here

Micron Ships Its Cheapest SSD With New 16n, Node

Last week Micron announced its newest solid-state drive (SSD), one that uses its densest process ever and one that has a chip capable of programming the memory to act like a high-performance SLC or high-capacity MLC flash drive. This new client-class SSD is known as the M600 SSD and uses Micron's new 16nm lithography with 128GB NAND density.

That greater density allows the company to drop the cost per GB to as low as $0.45. In addition to that, the ability to dynamically program the flash also reduces power use while improving write performance up to 2.8 times over models without this feature, according to Senior Technical Marketing Engineer for Micron Jon Tanguy. Tanguy also added that the M600 also has a sequential read/write rate of 560 MBps and has a random read/write rate of up to 100,000 I/Os per second and 88,000 I/Os per second, respectively.

The M600 is based on an 8-channel Marvell controller that comes with government-grade hardware encryption using the 256-bit AES protocol. This SSD is being marketed to manufacturers of corporate notebooks and ultra-thin netbooks as well as workstations and desktop PCs. As a result, the M600 comes in three form factors: a 2.5" SSD, an mSATA card and an M.2 memory stick. The mSATA and M.2 form factors come in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities for $80, $140 and $260, respectively. The 2.5" SSD comes in all the same capacities for the same prices but adds in a 1TB version that runs $450. In addition to that, the prices drop depending on the quantity you purchase, meaning the more you buy the cheaper they are per unit.

These prices may seem a little steep but they are in line with consumer-class products. SanDisk recently released its Ultra II SSD, which sells for $0.44 per GB. This SSD uses triple-level cell NAND flash, which means it stores three bits of data per NAND flash cell making it the densest industry specification to date. However, the more bits that are stored in cells the bigger the potential for data errors, which requires companies to create more sophisticated ECC.

Micron, instead of packing more bits in cells or over-provisioning its SSD with flash capacity, reduced the size of its process technology and added what "Dynamic Write Acceleration". Dynamic Write Acceleration is a special firmware that changes flash cells from single-level cell technology to multi-level cell technology. According to Tanguy, "So you can swap back and forth dynamically in order to deliver a pool of SLC or MLC capacity. Any new data programming is performed in SLC mode for really high performance."

This new firmware allows Micron to create a dynamic pool of cache without the need to overprovision. "We think doing this gives us a good method to address client loads that tend to be bursty in nature as opposed to enterprise data center write workloads that tend to be sustained," Tangy added. However, changing the NAND flash from SLC to MLC and back does increase write amplification. Increasing this wears out the usable lifespan of NAND flash more quickly. "The additional write amplification introduced with the new dynamic write acceleration firmware is manageable," Tanguy stated.

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Intel Unleashes New 320 Series SSD with Increased Capacity

Intel has just announced their newest product, the Intel SSD 320 Series, which represents a significant upgrade to Intel's existing lineup of solid-state drives. According to Intel, this series of SSD can have up to 600GB and improves performance all while having a better price than the current X25-M Series. This new SSD definitely fulfills Intel's promise of their 25-nanometer multilevel cell flash manufacturing process. This process increased production in 2010 and increased SSD capacity points while also reducing production costs by cramming 8GB of storage onto a single 167mm flash die.

For those of you who don't know, that is twice the capacity that could be produced by the previous 34nm process. Intel has done a lot of work with the 320 Series. Everything you know about the SSD has been redesigned. It now uses an all-new Intel controller and even supports 128-bit AES encryption. This series also enhances data reliability through extra arrays which amplify the error correction that is already in the flash. Then it adds a failsafe in order to enable the drive to complete writing a file even if it has been interrupted by a loss of power.

With all these new features, the new SSD should not have any problems appealing to the target audience of consumers and business users. Intel expects the 320 Series to even find a place in data center and server applications as a replacement for the 15,000 rpm hard drives. Intel has not yet released a retail pricing, however, they do expect the drives to sell in quantity for $89 (40GB), $159 (120GB), $289 (160GB) $529 (300GB) and $1,069 (600GB). If you want a comparison, the Crucial RealSSD 300 (256GB) currently sells for $475 while the Intel X25-M (160GB) goes for about $410.

Intel has stated that they expect the 160GB SSD 320 Series to sell for "about $100" less than the X25-M. A year ago a 256GB SSD would run you around $750, so if Intel's expected volume prices can become retail prices, we may just see a new lineup that could help adapt SSD into a more mainstream item.

Source: PCWorld - Intel 320 Series SSD Boosts Capacity, Drops Cost

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