At this year’s NAB 2015, JMR Electronics (www.jmr.com) and Sonnet Technologies (www.sonnettech.com) unveiled their respective versions of the industry’s first showing of a portable PCIe flash drive designed around the latest generation M.2 PCIe SSD module, which is the fastest standard SSD type now available, coupled with a 20Gb/s Thunderbolt 2 interface that provides the bandwidth necessary for the devices to sustain ultra-high file transfer speeds (1,000 to 1,200 MB/s) — fast enough to support 4K workflows.
The new portable bus-powered drives requiring no external power source, available in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB (1TB available Q3) storage capacities, are the ideal high performance alternatives to USB thumb drives, portable SATA based hard disk drives and current SSD storage products in the market. The PCIe based Thunderbolt 2 equipped drives easily connects to a compatible Mac® or Windows® computer with a Thunderbolt interface, or at the end of a Thunderbolt device daisy chain, via its attached Thunderbolt cable.
Both drives incorporate a PCIe Generation 3 flash controller, enabling them to easily outperform 6Gb/s SATA SSDs and USB 3.0 flash drives. The flash drives are also compatible with OS X 10.8.5+ (including Yosemite), Microsoft® Windows 8 and 7, and Windows Server 2012 and 2008.
To keep the size ultra-compact, JMR and Sonnet have both developed a proprietary heat sink technology integrated into the rugged aluminum enclosure to transfer heat away from the SSD, thus significantly extending its life span while offering complete silent operation. The power-efficient design also enables the devices to be bus-powered and require no power adapter.
The new PCIe flash drives from JMR, Sonnet and many other upcoming vendors will quickly displace current portable storage offerings, while setting new milestones for performance, portability and affordability for the industry. A few years back, it would have been hard to imagine a storage device that can fit neatly in the palm of your hand while delivering the blazingly fast performance of a multi-drive RAID storage system many times its size – all without fans, added weight, and a power cord. According to Robert Farnsworth, Sonnet Technologies CEO, the new flash drive will become an indispensible accessory for the creative professional requiring high-speed storage capabilities, and it is especially well suited to serve as an ultra-fast shuttle drive or a take-anywhere drive for editing 4K video at offsite shoots. OS X® users can install the operating system on the device to create an extremely fast boot drive, while OS X and Windows users can use the flash drive for instant-access media storage or as a high-performance scratch disk.
Sonnet’s Fusion PCIe Flash Drive is being demonstrated at the 2015 NAB Show in booth SL10824. Sonnet expects to make the new drive available in June 2015 at an MSRP of $499 for 256GB and $799 for 512GB.
JMR’s PCIe Flash Drive is being demonstrated at the NAB 2015 Show in booth SL12117. JMR will have general availability of their new drive at the same time as that of Sonnet with an expected MSRP of $549 for the 256GB and $849 for the 512GB versions.
At this year’s NAB 2015, JMR Electronics (www.jmr.com) and Sonnet Technologies (www.sonnettech.com) unveiled their respective versions of the industry’s first showing of a portable PCIe flash drive designed around the latest generation M.2 PCIe SSD module, which is the fastest standard SSD type now available, coupled with a 20Gb/s Thunderbolt 2 interface that provides the bandwidth necessary for the devices to sustain ultra-high file transfer speeds (1,000 to 1,200 MB/s) — fast enough to support 4K workflows.
The new portable bus-powered drives requiring no external power source, available in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB (1TB available Q3) storage capacities, are the ideal high performance alternatives to USB thumb drives, portable SATA based hard disk drives and current SSD storage products in the market. The PCIe based Thunderbolt 2 equipped drives easily connects to a compatible Mac® or Windows® computer with a Thunderbolt interface, or at the end of a Thunderbolt device daisy chain, via its attached Thunderbolt cable.
Both drives incorporate a PCIe Generation 3 flash controller, enabling them to easily outperform 6Gb/s SATA SSDs and USB 3.0 flash drives. The flash drives are also compatible with OS X 10.8.5+ (including Yosemite), Microsoft® Windows 8 and 7, and Windows Server 2012 and 2008.
To keep the size ultra-compact, JMR and Sonnet have both developed a proprietary heat sink technology integrated into the rugged aluminum enclosure to transfer heat away from the SSD, thus significantly extending its life span while offering complete silent operation. The power-efficient design also enables the devices to be bus-powered and require no power adapter.
The new PCIe flash drives from JMR, Sonnet and many other upcoming vendors will quickly displace current portable storage offerings, while setting new milestones for performance, portability and affordability for the industry. A few years back, it would have been hard to imagine a storage device that can fit neatly in the palm of your hand while delivering the blazingly fast performance of a multi-drive RAID storage system many times its size – all without fans, added weight, and a power cord. According to Robert Farnsworth, Sonnet Technologies CEO, the new flash drive will become an indispensible accessory for the creative professional requiring high-speed storage capabilities, and it is especially well suited to serve as an ultra-fast shuttle drive or a take-anywhere drive for editing 4K video at offsite shoots. OS X® users can install the operating system on the device to create an extremely fast boot drive, while OS X and Windows users can use the flash drive for instant-access media storage or as a high-performance scratch disk.
Sonnet’s Fusion PCIe Flash Drive is being demonstrated at the 2015 NAB Show in booth SL10824. Sonnet expects to make the new drive available in June 2015 at an MSRP of $499 for 256GB and $799 for 512GB.
JMR’s PCIe Flash Drive is being demonstrated at the NAB 2015 Show in booth SL12117. JMR will have general availability of their new drive at the same time as that of Sonnet with an expected MSRP of $549 for the 256GB and $849 for the 512GB versions.