Abundance of New SSDs at CES 2016

Solid-state drives were one of the most exciting products at last CES 2016 show in Las Vegas, NV last week, a global show on 2.47 million square feet of exhibition space with an attendance of 170,000 visitors and 3,800 exhibitors..

It’s the biggest show in the world for this kind of devices with Flash Memory Summit each August in Santa Clara, CA.

Today we publish all the announcements we got from CES on SSDs, USB keys and controllers during the event. They were focused on CE and embedded devices especially for automotive applications, rather than enterprise products.

They confirm some trends:

• Capacity is increasing as usual. An USB key, a little bigger than regular thumb drive, could pack 512GB. 256GB in a regular USB key is coming. 1TB is now a standard capacity for 2.5-inch SSD.
• M.2 is becoming a very popular form factor with the advantage of being smaller, reaching 1.5mm height (with 1TB) in comparison with 7mm for 2.5-inch device, both based on 6Gb SATA interface, but also PCIe with NVMe protocol becoming more and more popular.
• There is now many portable external SSDs that begin to take market share against external HDDs and now also offered for smartphones and tablets with USB 3.1 Type C connection available on latest Android units. SSD offers much faster speed than HDD with this recent interface not only promoted by Apple and that will kill FireWire and will be in competition with eSATA and Thunderbolt. External units with flash chips in 2.5-inch form factor are thinner. 7mm is the smallest height you can get for 2.5-inch portable HDDs but with a 750GB maximum capacity. 2TB is te limit in a 9.6mm device, a capacity available in 7mm SSD.
• Wireless is pushed for external storage devices including USB key but they need a battery.
• 3D NAND is coming with the arrival of new SSDs and controllers.
• Thin e.MMC published by JEDEC is becoming a standard for the automotive industry.
• Prices continue to decrease. The gap between HDD and SSD is narrowing but we are far to reach the same price per gigabyte. Nevertheless, for less than 500GB, rotating magnetic devices have already lost the war.

Exhibitors at CES 2016 on SSDs and related products included: Adata, Gigastone, HyperX (Kingston), LaCie (Seagate), Lexar, Lite-On, Marvell, Mushkin, OCZ (Toshiba), Patriot Memory, Plextor, Samsung, SanDisk (WD), Seagate, Silicon Motion, Synopsys, Toshiba, and Zotac.