SD Memory Cards Now a Faster Alternative with New SD Express Format

The SD Association announced its new SD Express format, which adds the popular PCI Express and NVMe interfaces to the legacy SD interface. This revolutionary innovation for SD memory cards achieves up to 985 MB/sec transfer rate, while keeping compatibility with existing billions SD hosts in the market. With growing storage capacities this might be an attractive alternative to USB memories for many portable storage applications.

Twist Bioscience, a company dedicated to DNA synthesis, working with Microsoft and University of Washington researchers, announced that they have successfully stored archival-quality audio recordings of two important music performances from the archives of the world-renowned Montreux Jazz Festival. Recordings were encoded and stored in DNA, for the first time. This is the first time DNA has been used as a long-term archival-quality storage medium. The tiny specks of DNA will preserve a part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Archive, where valuable cultural heritage collections are recorded.

Sonnet Technologies introduced a new version of its Fusion Thunderbolt 3 PCIe Flash Drive, a rugged, pocket-size solid-state drive (SSD) storage device with Thunderbolt 3 interface. Equipped with 1TB of NVMe flash storage, the latest Fusion Thunderbolt 3 PCIe Flash Drive is compatible with both Mac and Windows computers, and leverages the 40Gb/s bandwidth of Thunderbolt 3 to deliver data transfer speeds up to 2600 MB/s.

Need to increase your uncompressed and high-resolution audio library? Your 4K video library is expanding? Western Digital Corporation announced that its G-Technology product lines are now available with new 8TB and 10TB enterprise-class hard drives with increased performance to keep up with growing storage needs. For the moment, these storage solutions still use Thunderbolt 2 interfaces, which should be OK if you really need to expand now. Otherwise, wait for the new Thunderbolt 3/USB 3.1 systems, using USB-C connectors, probably coming early 2017.

JMR Electronics announced general availability of its new portable Thunderbolt 2 equipped SSD Flash Drive. The ultra-compact and high performance Lightning LTNG-XTD Flash Drive is the ideal alternative to USB thumb drives, portable SATA based hard disk drives and current SSD storage products in the market.

Significant progress achieved at recent IEEE 802 Plenary meetings highlights Ethernet’s increasing relevance in rapidly diversifying base of markets and applications. Progress across several Ethernet projects includes 25Gb/s operations for next-gen servers, 100Mb/s operations for automotive and signalling decisions for 400GbE.

It doesn’t matter how many “unlimited storage” cloud services we subscribe too, the truth is, laptops with only 256GB suck big time. The future looks much brighter when we hear about a 6 Terabyte SSD coming to market. OK, it might be sometime until we can afford one, but at least we know its coming, from Fixstars.

Pegasus2, the world’s first RAID 5 storage solution with Thunderbolt 2 is an ideal solution for any recording studio preparing to upgrade to the new Apple Mac Pro. The new Pegasus2 storage family with Thunderbolt 2 delivers 20Gbps of bandwidth, …