You might not know about Nidec, but this Japanese company makes the spindle motors inside around 85% of all HDDs in the world-- and it now warns the sales of motors used in PC HDDs are set to drop by -50% in 2019.

According to the Nidec fiscal 2018 (ending 31 March 2019) financial report, HDD unit sales are down by 43% from 2010 to 2018, falling from a 2010 high of around 650 million units to 375m in 2018. The company predicts such a trend is only set to continue, with 2019 sales set to drop to 309m before falling to 290m in 2020. As for the kinds of HDDs worst affect by the downturn Nidec points at PC HDDs, with sales falling from 289m in 2013 to 124m in 2018.

Western Digital (WD) announces the addition of an NVMe model to the Blue SSD line-- the Blu SN500 NVMe SSD, a model promising x3 the performance of the SATA counterpart aimed at content creators and enthusiast customers.

The SN500 leverages the scalable in-house architecture of the Black SN750 NVMe SSD, and is built on WD 3D NAND technology, firmware and controller. The result, the company says, is an SSD with sequential read and write speeds reaching up to 1700MB/s and 1450MB/s respectively (for the 500GB model), with power consumption as low as 2.7W.

The SD Association takes to MWC 2019 to reveal the next generation of tiny memory cards-- microSD Express, offering the PCI Express and NVMe interfaces to allowing data transfers reaching up to 985MB/s.

microSD Express retains the legacy microSD interface, allowing for backwards compatibility. As defined in the SD 7.1 specification, microSD Express cards will be available in a range of capacities, including microSDHC Express, microSDXC Express and microSDUC Express, all delivering the speeds necessary to transfer the large amounts of data generated by data-intense communications, speed hungry applications, multi-channel IoT devices, autonomous use, higher resolution mobile video and VR.

DRAM module and NAND flash product maker ADATA Technology launches the Ultimate SU750-- a 2.5-inch SATA 6Gb/s SSD featuring next-generation TLC (triple-level cell) 3D NAND flash.

The SU750 SSDs include SLC Caching allowing for read/write speeds of upt o 550/520MB per second. The use of flash technology adds more resistance to shock and vibration (1500G/0.5ms, the company says), providing better data protection, as well as silent and more power efficient performance. LDPC (Low-Density Parity-Check) error correcting code technology allows the SSDs to detect and fix errors, ensuring data integrity.