GoKawiil
Tech News
SK hynix confirmed it will build a new US fab for its subsidiary Solidigm to expand production of 3D QLC NAND flash used in high-capacity enterprise SSDs, as AI-driven demand strains existing capacity. However, the company has shelved plans for a Solidigm IPO or pre-IPO funding round, citing market volatility and a semiconductor stock correction. No timeline, output figures, or financing plan have been disclosed.
Amazon is selling Apple's 16.2-inch MacBook Pro configured with an M5 Max chip, 36GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD for $3,499, a $900 reduction from its original price. This marks the lowest price yet recorded for this particular configuration.
The Lexar ES3 512GB Portable SSD is being sold at a reduced price, marked down 27% from its usual cost. The drive uses USB 3.2 Gen 2 connectivity and offers read speeds of up to 1050MB/s in a slim portable form factor.
Amazon is selling the SanDisk 1TB Extreme Portable SSD for $243, a $56 reduction from its usual price. The drive uses USB-C connectivity for fast transfer speeds and carries an IP65 rating for dust and water resistance.
Amazon is selling a Dell 15.6-inch laptop at a 22% discount, cutting $130 off its price. The configuration includes an Intel Core 3 100U processor, 8GB of RAM, a Full HD display, and a 512GB SSD.
Amazon has cut the price of the 4TB Samsung 990 Pro PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD from $1,099.99 to $799.90, a reduction of over $300. The discount brings the drive's cost down to roughly 20 cents per gigabyte.
Seoul-based SSD controller maker FADU introduced File-Semantic SSD (FS-SSD) at the 2026 OCP Global Summit, a design that moves filesystem logic into the SSD so GPUs, DPUs, and NICs can access files without a host filesystem, block layer, or storage-server CPU. In FADU's preliminary NFS-over-NVMe test on its FC6161 Gen6 controller, throughput held around 460,000 ops/s whether the server used 16 cores or just one, far outperforming Linux NFS-over-RDMA, which dropped from about 150,000 to 40,000 ops/s. FADU says the technology is still under active development, with Gen6-host results expected by Q1 2027 and partner samples by Q3 2027.
Most laptops that feel slow are not short of processing power. They are held back by a hard drive, a lack of memory, a clogged fan, or a browser doing too much.
With DDR5 memory, NVMe SSDs and GPUs all seeing sharp price increases online, Micro Center's roughly 30 U.S. brick-and-mortar locations are reportedly offering better value through bundled component deals than major online retailers like Newegg, Amazon and Best Buy. The report notes an Nvidia RTX 5090 currently sells for $6,549.99 from a third-party Amazon seller, far above its $1,999.99 launch MSRP.
SK hynix has unveiled an in-house processing core called the Hynix Transaction Processing Unit (H-TPU), designed to handle routine I/O tasks in SSD controllers alongside traditional Arm CPU cores. Presented by VP Koo In-jae at ISOCC 2026, the chip reportedly uses about 2.5% of a general-purpose CPU core's power and 4% of its area, and SK hynix plans to roll it out across its NAND product lineup, including upcoming enterprise SSD controllers.
A project called Janas-LLM has published benchmarks showing it can run large mixture-of-experts models, including a 48GB Qwen3-Next-80B model, on a 32GB laptop by streaming model 'experts' from an NVMe SSD rather than keeping everything in RAM. Tests on an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H laptop with its integrated Arc GPU showed Janas-LLM generating text at 24 tokens/sec versus llama.cpp's 2.8 tokens/sec on that model, with similar gains across a dozen other open models from Qwen and Gemma families. The developers released a benchmarking tool, janas-bench, and installation instructions for Linux x86-64 so others can reproduce results on their own hardware.
SanDisk has released the NAS 800, an M.2 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD built for NAS appliances, available in 960GB, 1.92TB, 3.84TB and 7.68TB capacities priced from $387.99 to $2,749.99. The drive uses an SMI SM2508 controller with DRAM and SanDisk's TLC 3D NAND, and is based on the same hardware as the Optimus GX Pro 8100 (formerly WD Black SN8100), with sequential reads up to 14,900 MB/s.