Micron launches a pair of NVMe SSD lines through the Crucial consumer brand-- the P2 and P5, with the P5 being the first SSD from the company featuring an in-house controller design in a retailer capacity.

Available in capacities including 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB, the P5 offers sequential read speeds reaching 3400MB/s. Sequential write speeds reach 3000MB/s with exception of the 250GB model. Instead, the lowest-capacity option provides sequential write speeds clocking at 1400MB/s. Random read IOPS are 210000 for the 250 and 500GB SSDs, while the 1TB offers 390000 and the 2TB drives at 430000. On the other hand, random write IOPS are 355000 for the 250GB model and 500000 for all the others. Micron adds all the drives include a set of encryption standards, allowing for some security.

Team Group announces the T-Force Cardea Zero Z330 and Z340-- a pair of M.2 form factor NVMe PCIe Gen3 x4 SSDs featuring a patented graphene copper foil cooling module providing what the company claims is a 9% cooling effect in sustained use.

The cooling module is just 1mm thick, and Team Group says the cooling effect can be observed after three hours of continuous read/write ops. That said, one has to keep in mind the SSDs were compared with drives lacking any cooling, as opposed to an SSD with a conventional metal heatsink. However it does make for drives with an attractive black and gold design aimed primarily at gamer customers.

Transcend launches the USD230I, a range of microSD cards with support for pseudo-SLC caching to boost burst write speeds. The company claims the cards offer data transfer speeds of up to 100MB/s, while random read/write reaches 3400 IOPS.

The cards carry both A1 and V3 badges, meaning they can be used to install Google Android applications with a minimum write speed of up to 30MB/s, or good enough for 4K video shooting. First introduced back in 2017, so far pseudo-SLC caching has not been used in other memory cards. The USD230I range uses 3D TLC NAND memory, necessitating the need for pSLC caching to boost writing performance.

Synology announces an entry-level consumer NAS-- the DiskStation DS220j, a 2-bay storage device able to hold up to 32TB of storage via two 16TB drives, making ideal for a personal cloud solution for data sharing and backup.

The DiskStation DS220j is based on a Realtek RTD1296, a 64-bit, 4-core 1.4GHz CPU, together with 512MB of DDR4 RAM. It has two 3.5-inch bays able to house both 3.5- and 2.5-inch devices, as well as x1 GBe and x2 USB-A ports. It operates the drives in Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR), Basic, JBOD, RAID 0 or RAID 1 modes, and while it uses the ext4 file systems it also supports ext4, ext3, FAT, NTFS, HFS+, and exFAT. Synology claims performance reaches over 112MB/s, at least in terms of sequential read/write.