Customers wanting a sleek portable SSD get an Adata option with the SE760, a device promising broad compatibility and high performance with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface allowing for speeds reaching up to 10Gbps.

Available in 256GB, 512GB and 1TB capacities, the SE760 carries 3D NAND flash and is rated to perform at sequential read/write speeds of up to 1Gbps. The brushed metal enclosure comes in black or gray, measures 122.2 x 44 x 14mm and weighs 95g. While the drive features a USB-C interface, Adata includes both USB-C to USB-C and USB-C to USB-A cables in order to ensure compatibility with any PC.

Japan's Showa Denko (SDK) develops the technology for the manufacturing of next-generation HDDs based on Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR), enabling the eventual creation of 3.5-inch HDDs with capacities reaching 70-80TB.

As the name suggests, HAMR is a recording method involving the heating of a magnetic film in order to record data. To do so, the SDK technology uses small grains of magnetic crystals with thermal stability and information writability. Also involved are aluminium platters and a thin films of Fe-Pt alloy, a magnetic material both powerful and with high corrosion resistance.

JEDEC Solid State Technology Association publishes Universal Flash Storage (UFS) version 3.1 (aka JESD220E), an update to the standard promising to increase performance, minimise power usage and potentially cut the costs of high-capacity storage devices.

Key updates to the standard include Write Booster (a SLC non-volatile cache to amplify write speeds), DeepSleep (a low-power state for lower-cost systems) and Performance Throttling Notification (allows the UFS device to notify the host when high temperatures throttle storage performance). A JESD220-3 Host Performance Booster (HPB) extension provides an option to cache the UFS device logical-to-physical address map to system DRAM, providing larger and faster caching and thus improving the read performance of the device.

CES 2020 has TerraMaster present the F5-422, a five-bay NAS with 10GbE ethernet connectivity powered by the Intel Celeron J3455 quad-core SoC (1.5-2.3GHz) together with 4GB of memory (expandable to 12GB).

The unit holds five 3.5/2.5-inch HDDs or SSDs, and supports a total of 80TB of storage. As a modern NAS, it handles various RAID modes, including RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6 and RAID 10. Performance tops out at 670MB/s read and 650MB/s write with all drives running in RAID 5 mode. Meanwhile the TOS 4.1 OS supports SSD caching to accelerate I/O performance as well as multiple security layers, including clustered Btrfs file system, snapshots, AES hardware folder encryption, network transport encryption and scheduled backups (including cloud backups).