Showing posts with label drive. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drive. Show all posts

6.27.2022

Enthusiasts have figured out how to insert a larger SSD into Steam Deck - Valve warns it could break the console

Enthusiasts have figured out how to insert a larger SSD into Steam Deck - Valve warns it could break the console

Enthusiasts have figured out how to insert a larger SSD into Steam Deck - Valve warns it could break the console

Valve has responded to online instructions for modifying the Steam Deck portable gaming console to install a non-standard, larger SSD.
Image source: ValveName, the portable console is sold in versions with a 64GB eMMC flash module or a 256GB or 512GB NVMe SSD PCIe 3.0 x4.
The latter two use the M.2 2230 (22 × 30 mm) standard model.Enthusiast Belly Jelly showed that instead of the M.2 2230 solution, the longer M.2 2242 (22 × 42 mm) drive fits nicely into the console, giving you more options for upgrading your storage.
True, this modification requires a slight bending of the heat spreader and removal of one of the thermal gaskets.
And as Valve has now stated, such tampering could result in console failure.
\"Please don't do that.
The integrated circuitry of the charging circuitry gets very hot, so you should not move nearby thermal pads.
Also, most M.2 2242 drives use more power and get hotter than what the console is designed for.
This modification may seem to work, but it will significantly shorten the life of the Steam Deck,\" according to the report.
To recap, the Steam Deck has a 7-inch touchscreen display with a resolution of 1280 × 800 pixels, flanked by gaming controls.
It comes with AMD's Zen 2 quad-core hybrid processor with RDNA 2 integrated graphics, 16GB of LPDDR5 memory, Wi-Fi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 5.0 wireless adapters.

6.23.2022

WD Black SN770 PCIe 4.0 drive review: the fantastic SSD you can't find

WD Black SN770 PCIe 4.0 drive review: the fantastic SSD you can't find

WD Black SN770 PCIe 4.0 drive review: the fantastic SSD you can't find

\"The market has decided\" is a phrase often heard from skeptics who believe that free competition without regulation inevitably leads to quality deterioration due to manufacturers' desire to reduce production costs indefinitely.
While this may be the case, the market has taken a turn for the worse in the low-cost PCIe 4.0 SSD segment.
Indeed, leading manufacturers have almost completely abandoned the use of QLC-memory in such drives and now cheapen them not at the expense of slow flash memory with low life expectancy, and by using four-channel controllers and the introduction of technology HMB instead of adding a buffer SDRAM-memory.Initially, this design does not seem a good option - until recently, bufferless NVMe-drives do not look particularly attractive, offering a deliberately lower performance against their full counterparts.
The only relatively bright spot in this segment was the Samsung 980, but even that could not compete with midrange drives even from second- or third-tier companies, let alone more pedigree products.
But progress does not stand still, and very recently the market competition gave birth to the Innogrit IG5220 bufferless platform, a high class budget solution.
The first Patriot P400 SSD in our lab was a real sensation: as it turned out, bufferless SSDs are no longer a verdict, and in real-world workloads they are quite capable of offering near-flagship performance.
Even better, the Patriot P400 has stirred up other manufacturers as well, who also began to produce similar or even better in consumer characteristics solutions.
So, quite recently Western Digital has released a novelty that is no less attractive.
Despite the fact that at the end of last year it already released bufferless PCI 4.0-drive WD Black SN750 SE based on public platform Phison E19T, now it was replaced by a new model, strengthened on all fronts - WD Black SN770.
And this is a direct result of the market mechanisms.WD Black SN750 SE, obviously, could not compete adequately with solutions like Patriot P400, and Western Digital had to urgently restructure the lineup.
And this time the company decided not to step on the same rake a second time and instead of choosing another publicly available platform for the inexpensive PCIe 4.0 SSD made its own, which should be even better.
That's how the new hero, the WD Black SN770 appeared, which, although inspired by the Innogrit IG5220 platform, is made from start to finish by SanDisk's internal engineering team.Judging by the specs, the WD Black SN770 offers about a half as much performance as the Black SN750 SE and gets into the same league as the Crucial P5 Plus, even though we are talking about a simple bufferless model.
That said, the Black SN770's recommended price is on par with the Black SN750 SE and almost identical to the Samsung 980's recommended price, which is causing a lot of interest in the novelty.
And although Western Digital drives are no longer supplied to Russia through the official channel, there is hope that the Black SN770 will still get to domestic retailers under the parallel import scheme.
To prepare ourselves for this moment, we have carried out comprehensive testing of this SSD.⇡#Appearance and internal designWD Black SN770 is made as a single-sided M.2 2280-board with black textolite and without any pre-installed cooling means.
You could say that it looks like a typical budget SSD, but there is one peculiarity - all its stuffing is tightly packed into just two chips.
One chip is a proprietary SanDisk controller labeled 20-82-10081-A1.
Western Digital does not disclose details of its developments, but we know that this chip is built on the same functional blocks as the controller 20-82-10034-A1, which is used in the flagship WD Black SN850.
But in this case it is considerably simplified: DRAM interface is removed from it, instead of which the support of HMB technology is added, as well as the number of flash-memory channels is reduced to four.
However, there is good news.
First of all, the WD Black SN770 controller still has full support for four PCIe 4.0 lanes.
Secondly, it is compatible with the modern and fast 112-layer BiCS5 memory with an interface frequency of 1.2 GHz, which Western Digital has been producing since the beginning of last year.
In fact, the second chip on the WD Black SN770 carries SanDisk's BiCS5 memory chips.
In this case it is 512 Gbit TLC 3D NAND devices in the amount corresponding to the capacity of the drive.
For the purposes of this review we are considering a terabyte, and in it the flash memory array is assembled from 16 crystals

6.06.2022

Toshiba Unveils 2TB Hard Drive DT02 for Desktop

Toshiba Unveils 2TB Hard Drive DT02 for Desktop

Toshiba Unveils 2TB Hard Drive DT02 for Desktop

Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corp.
has announced the new DT02 hard drive in a 3.5-inch form factor.
It features Drive-Managed SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) technology.Image source: ToshibaThe new drive has a capacity of 2TB and spindle speed of 7200rpm.
Standard SATA 3.0 interface is used for connection.
Drive-Managed SMR technology combines the Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) method and a number of performance optimizations such as hardware write management, cache and more.
It claims to deliver up to 210MB/s performance improvements of up to 19% over its predecessor, while its MTBF (mean time between failures) is up to 600,000 hours.
The disk is intended to be used in desktop computers, all-in-one PCs and also in external drives.
There is no information about approximate price yet.

5.20.2022

Zadak TWSG4S SSDs with PCIe 4.0 x4 interface introduced

Zadak TWSG4S SSDs with PCIe 4.0 x4 interface introduced

Zadak TWSG4S SSDs with PCIe 4.0 x4 interface introduced

Zadak has announced the TWSG4S family of high performance SSDs.
The new products are suitable for use in desktops, laptops, and Sony PlayStation 5 game consoles.Image source: ZadakThe products are made in the popular M.2 2280 form factor based on 3D NAND flash memory chips.
For data exchange uses PCIe 4.0 x4 interface - specification NVMe 1.4.The series includes models with a capacity of 512 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB.
Claimed read speeds of up to 7,400 Mbytes/s and write speeds of 7,000 Mbytes/s.
The drives feature up to 1,000,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) on random reads and random writes of up to 4K blocks and are offered with two cooling solutions - ultra-thin graphene and aluminum heatsinks.
The first reduces operating temperature by an average of 15%, and the second reduces temperature by 35%.The products are backed by a five-year warranty.
There is no information about the approximate price at the moment.