The television industry never stands still, with manufacturers introducing new technologies every year to improve their TVs and convince you that now is the time to upgrade.Over the past few years we've seen the move from CRT to thin TVs, we've seen the...
(credit: Edward Chester)
The all new Samsung 960 Pro, released today, is the follow up to last year's 950 Pro. It offers the same core set of features, with an M.2 form factor, four-lane PCIe 3.0 interface, NVMe communication standard, and 3D V-NAND. But the 960 Pro isn't just a minor spec bump. Samsung has seriously cranked up the speed (and capacities) of its flagship drives to the point where such ludicrous performance may be lost on all but the most demanding of users. These are some seriously hardcore SSDs.
Where the 950 Pro was available in just 256GB and 512GB versions, the 960 Pro starts at 512GB, with 1TB and 2TB versions also available. For the first time, you can reasonably consider replacing an entire array of spinner hard drives or even 2.5-inch SATA SSDs with these things—so long as you've got the cash, of course. With a 256GB starting capacity, Samsung was able to offer the speed, longevity, and warranty of the 950 Pro to those only able to budget £170 ($199) for an SSD. But with the 960 Pro starting at $329 for the 512GB model (probably ~£330), rising to $629 for 1TB, and an eye-watering $1,299 for 2TB, you'll need to save some extra pennies to buy one, or wait it out for the Evo drives Samsung is launching later this year.
Although a marked step down from the Pro range in some regards, the Evos are in theory faster than the 950 Pro drives for less money (thanks to using cheaper and more tightly packed TLC V-NAND). The 250GB will cost just $129 (~£130), 500GB will be $249 and 1TB will cost $470. There won't be a 2TB version of the 960 Evo.
The arrival of Samsung's 256Gb 48-layer 3D NAND has allowed the 850 EVO product line to expand once more with the introduction of the first 4TB consumer SSD: a drive that pushes the limits of NAND flash manufacturing, SSD controller capabilities, and the conventional wisdom of where SSDs fit in the storage market.
Trend Micro in a blog post is alleging that Qualcomm's "Snapdragon" family of system on a chip computers are riddled with numerous security vulnerabilities, particularly when paired with Google's Android operating system (archived). The continued plagues of leaky abstraction and faux compartmentalization which require ever larger collections of "teams" to design new chips in the popular style as well as the war on computing suggest that we are going to increasingly see security vulnerabilities baked into silicon. Instead of celebrating the death of Moore's law as occasion to move towards saner architectural decisions, the trend appears to be favoring further insanity and a proliferation of nooks and crannies for culturing security holes organically or placing them deliberately.
Today At CES SanDisk Corporation launched what they are calling the world’s thinnest 1TB M.2 form factor SSD, the X400. The X400 is only 1.5mm thick. In order to achieve this level of ultra-slim thinness, The X400 is only single sided—the first single sided 1TB SATA M.2. With the X400 customers should see faster boot times, faster application launch times, as well as extended battery life.
Today Seagate Technology announced that it has launched the thinnest 2TB portable hard drive on the market, the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim. Seagate has built the new drive off of its Backup Plus Slim Drive. The new Ultra Slim will deliver the same high capacity of 2TB at an even thinner design. The Ultra Slim also comes with 200GB of Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage and Lyve software compatibility just like the Seagate 4TB Backup Plus.
