Blackbox Hosting has consolidated storage from two full racks down to just 8U of rack space following migration to Everpure FlashArray hardware, achieving a 10:1 data reduction ratio and an 85% reduction in power utilization.
HPE has direct visibility into memory supply chains in a way that most companies don't. When they say the shortage runs longer than expected, that's not speculation. It's procurement reality. HPE's server segment actually declined 2.7% year over year despite the company being at the center of enterprise AI infrastructure, with memory constraints identified as the reason.
With this setup, the Samsung SSD achieved read speeds of roughly 4,000 MB/s and write speeds of about 1,300 MB/s. Those are great numbers. Accessing files felt instantaneous. It took no time at all to open the movie I stored inside the drive. The read speed also shows that the enclosure isn't restricting the drive. It's making full use of the Thunderbolt connection. Writing large files is equally impressive, letting users save big files fast.
In the not-so-distant past, the solution for boosting the speed of an aging, sluggish PC was to add more RAM or upgrade the processor. Now, the way to sail over that speed bump is to get a new storage drive, and there's no better storage upgrade for performance than fitting your system with an M.2 drive. Also: What is MoCA 2.5? How this low-cost networking option can seriously improve your internet There is no shortage of excellent M.2 drives out there, but if you're looking for high-end performance and stability when the going gets tough, the is well worth a look.
As investors turned their back on software (notably, the seat-based software-as-a-service companies), they're turned towards hardware in a big-time way. You wouldn't know it by looking at those flat shares of Nvidia ( NASDAQ:NVDA), but the iShares Semiconductor ETF ( NASDAQ:SOXX) is up around 13% year to date, with few signs of slowing down. The winners within semis have been broad, but the undisputed kings of the 2026 semiconductor surge belongs to the memory and storage stocks.
But zoom out, and the picture changes dramatically. The stock is up 31% over the past month and 63% year-to-date, riding a wave of AI storage demand that's reshaping the data center landscape. While the broader semiconductor sector, tracked by the VanEck Semiconductor ETF (NYSEARCA:SMH), gained 1.51% this week and 13% year-to-date, Western Digital's outperformance tells a specific story about who's winning in AI infrastructure.
The Xeon 600 lineup spans the gamut between 12 and 86 performance cores (no cut-down efficiency cores here), with support for between four and eight channels of DDR5 and 80 to 128 lanes of PCIe 5.0 connectivity. Compared to its aging W-3500-series chips, Intel is claiming a 9 percent uplift in single threaded workloads and up to 61 percent higher performance in multithreaded jobs, thanks in no small part to an additional 22 processor cores this generation.
