As part of our CES 2017 vendor visits, we talked to Mushkin and Edge Memory about their upcoming products. For those unaware, both Mushkin and Edge Memory are brands of Avant Technology. Both brands share a number of products, with Edge Memory focusing more on the enterprise and SMB / SME market segment. Mushkin's CES 2017 announcements have already been covered last week. The external direct-attached storage products are being currently prepared for sale under the Edge Memory brand.

The most interesting of all the new products are the VSC SD cards (Video Speed Class). While the SD Association recently announced the A1 application-performance class for use in general computing environments, the Video Speed Class rating is meant for cards used in video recording environments - including, but not restricted to, products like action cameras, dashcams, IP cameras, and the like. The key here is that the card must be able to guarantee a minimum sustained write speed to qualify for one of the VSC classes.

Image Courtesy: SD Association

In Spring 2017, Edge Memory plans to launch a suite of SDXC (16-256 GB) and micro-SDXC (16 - 128 GB) cards with operating temperature range between -25C and 85C. This makes them suitable for industrial use-cases also.

The cards are expected to come in a range of VSC ratings. Claimed performance numbers indicate 225 MBps reads and 195 MBps writes. However, what really matters is the VSC rating that reflects the sustained write speeds that decide the suitability of these cards for a particular application.

Edge Memory also announced a number of other products - a bus-powered USB 3.0 enclosure for M.2 SATA SSDs (using ASMedia ASM1153E for the micro-B version, and the ASM1351/1542 for the Type-C version), a USB OTG-compatible flash drive with both Type-C and Type-A interfaces, and new members in the diskGO Secure Ultra USB Storage lineup which has a keypad / physical PIN support to enable hardware encryption of the contents.

Avant Technologies seems to be sharing the required R&D for flash-based product lines between Mushkin and Edge Memory. In bringing the products to the market, it is clear that Mushkin is targeting the average consumer / gamer, while Edge Memory targets business and industrial use-cases. The DAS ineup from Edge Memory for the first half of 2017 appears to tap into that market quite well.

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  • Bullwinkle J Moose - Monday, January 23, 2017 - link

    Sorry, I'm not a fan of these guaranteed "minimum sustained write speeds"

    I also need "consistency" between identical products

    Regardless of brand name, I consistently find Toshiba Flash products either rating their read speeds at double what I find in actual use (PNY/Mushkin}
    or
    Heavy Throttling (Mushkin Enhanced Ventura Ultra)
    or
    inconsistency of performance between identical thumb drives (Sandisk Extreme)

    The only Thumb drive using Toshiba Flash that I have ever seen consistency of performance on is the Corsair GTX but that might be due to Trim and garbage collection

    The new SanDisk Extreme Pro 256 GB Flash Drive with USB 3.1 "Might" be as consistent as the Corsair but I'm not spending $80 more for a thumbdrive with 30MB/sec slower reads just to find out

    Surprisingly, I have yet to kill a single thumb drive using Toshiba Flash but I'm still trying!

    Is this Company doing ANYTHING about consistency of performance in their products instead of looking just at minimums which appear to change over time in certain brands like Sandisk?
  • Bullwinkle J Moose - Monday, January 23, 2017 - link

    NOTE:

    It may be that the 3 (Fixed Disk) Sandisk Extreme Thumb drives I purchased had different firmware revisions (or maybe not)

    What was troubling was that they all started life at the same performance levels (+/- a few %) and slowly degraded over time to 3 distinct performance levels
    1 is still quite fast, 1 is so-so, and 1 is very slow

    The only way to temporarily return them to anything close to new performance levels is to wipe them "completely" with Killdisk

    This is because they do not have Trim or garbage collection and erased data remains on the drive when using them for Windows2Go which progressively gets worse over time

    Erased data MUST be wiped to regain performance, yet each of the 3 thumb drives "consistently" degrade to 3 distinct levels of performance (bad/better/best)

  • A5 - Monday, January 23, 2017 - link

    ...this is for SD cards, not thumb drives.
  • Bullwinkle J Moose - Monday, January 23, 2017 - link

    "...this is for SD cards, not thumb drives."
    ------------------------------------------------------
    Regardless, it still sucks buying an SD card rated at 20MB/sec write speed and getting frame drops on a camcorder while recording at 1.5MB/sec (PNY)

    The problem is the Flash Memory Used, not the type of memory card!

    Same problem regardless.....
  • londedoganet - Monday, January 23, 2017 - link

    Isn't SSD performance usually dictated by the controller? What is different between the flash memory used in SD cards and SSDs that make the memory chips themselves the limiting factor in the case of SD card performance consistency?
  • Bullwinkle J Moose - Monday, January 23, 2017 - link

    "Isn't SSD performance usually dictated by the controller?"
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The controller, the firmware and the type of flash
    The Sandisk thumb drive might have the same type of flash but the controller and firmware can distribute the read/write speeds differently

    The Sandisk reads 30MB/sec slower than the Corsair but the Corsair writes 30MB/sec slower than the Sandisk

    Someone else will need to tell you the difference between Flash for SD cards and Flash for SSDs because I'm too lazy to Google it and need to get back to my video games....
  • drajitshnew - Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - link

    Sandisk extreme thumb drives do NOT support trim or garbage collection while corsair does. That means in the used state sandisk will drop more than corsair
  • drajitshnew - Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - link

    Sandisk extreme thumb drives do NOT support trim or garbage collection while corsair does. That means in the used state sandisk will drop more than corsair
  • tamalero - Monday, January 23, 2017 - link

    90MB/s for 8k video? doesn't 4k need more than 120MB/s?
  • DanNeely - Monday, January 23, 2017 - link

    Depends what your frame rate and compression level is...

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