An article on something I'm working on :D

There's been a few articles out about something I'm working on so I thought I'd put a link to it incase people are interested.

Most of the stuff I've worked on in the last few years are all data center drives so not something an average pc consumer would use they are highly specific to those workloads with a focus on read latency (so your tweets and so on show up quick) and as such the coverage of it tends to be either non existent or just press releases. I've not worked on anything that was a "consumer" product for quite a few years now and even then it would have been back when I was doing USB bridge chips that went into things like WD/Seagate/Buffalo/lacie/others usb harddrive products. Some time after I moved out to the US things pivoted over to SSD's when the company I worked for was bought by the now defunct OCZ.

I've been working on XD6 for Kioxia (formerly Toshiba Memory who bought up OCZ's assets and teams post bankruptcy) in the flash interface part of the firmware for a while now. It's a nvme based pci gen 4 device uses the companies 96 layer TLC based 3d nand. The device is still in the final stages but starting to get out to customers qualification and the press releases are out so I can talk about it somewhat :D

This article talks about the device in a vaguely marketing/technical blurb and the new form factor E1.S drives that are the new hotness in datacenters. It's a sort of bigger version of the consumer gum stick M.2 but not quite as large as the U.2 2.5"ish format. As I understand this offers a better trade off between capacity power and thermal characteristics for datacenters. It even mentions the last product I worked on the HK6 a sata based ssd which I even got a patent out of for the thermal and power management code using some feedback systems (that cyb degree finally paying off :S) although I think in the end they simplified it in the final device.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16215/kioxia-announces-xd6-datacenter-ssd...

pretty dry stuff and not very interesting to consumers although a bit more accessible than some of the other articles about XD6 out there. Still nice to see something I've put a lot of effort into crossing the finish line and getting a small amount of press.

So while you're never going to see this in a home pc it might well be running the underlying cloud on services you use in the near future although i can't say where or who might be using it only that you'd probably have heard of them :P