EMC has reported declining profits in July, and its core storage division has seen revenue growth grind to a halt; it grew just 2 percent between 2013 and 2014, compared to 16 percent between 2010 and 2011. Activist hedge fund Elliott Management Corp., which has a 2 percent stake in EMC, has also pressured the company to sell its 80 percent stake in VMware.

Dell was taken private in 2013 in a $25 billion (16 billion) leveraged buyout by founder Michael Dell and private equity firm Silver Lake. Even before the buyout, it had been increasingly positioning itself as an enterprise-oriented firm, expanding its server, storage, and security offerings in a bid to move away from the slim margins of the PC business. Merging with some or all of EMC would be consistent with this shift.

EMC stockholders are to receive approximately $33.15 per share in a combination of cash as well as tracking stock linked to a portion of EMC's economic interest in the VMware business.

VMware will remain an independent, publicly-traded company.

http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2015/10/report-dell-in-merger-talks-with-storage-giant-emc/

http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/uscorp1/secure/2015-10-12-dell-emc-transaction

No word yet on what this means for Dell's existing PowerVault enterprise storage division, created from previously acquired EqualLogic and Compellent.

AMD will start selling a range of SSD products under the Radeon brand later this year. However, with the flash chips sources from Toshiba (19nm) and controller sourced from Indilinx (Barefoot 3) AMD isn't exactly bringing anything new to the table.

Anandtech reviewed the Samsung 850 Pro SSD that features a new 3D storage structure.

For years it has been known that the scalability of traditional NAND is coming to an end. Every die shrink has been more difficult than the previous as the endurance and performance have decreased with every node, making it less and less efficient to scale the size down.

By stacking transistors (i.e. cells when speaking about NAND) vertically, Samsung is able to relax the process node back to a much more convenient 40nm. When there are 32 cells on top of each other, it is obvious that there is no need for a 10nm-class node because the stacking increases the density, allowing production costs to scale lower. As we have seen with the history of NAND die shrinks, a higher process node provides more endurance and higher performance, which is what the 850 Pro and V-NAND is all about.

Although launching with a slight cost premium over traditional NAND, the benchmarks show that this drive is "without a doubt the best drive in the market" and the future of solid state drives.

The corporate overlords of SandForce SSD controllers have changed hands again. Seagate, who was missing an SSD controller of its own, will become the new home. The following list gives a brief history of the numerous mergers involved:

• 1999 - HP's non-computing products division spun out as Agilent
• August 2005 - Agilent semiconductor products group spun out as Avago
• January 2012 - SandForce sold to LSI ($370 million)
• 2014 - LSI sold to Avago ($6.6 billion)
• May 2014 - Avago SSD division sold to Seagate ($450 million)

Because of easy licensing and not being tied to a particular NAND manufacturer, SandForce SSD controllers are very popular and have found their way into many product lines , including:

• Intel 520, 530, 535, 330, 335
• Kingston HyperX, HyperX 3K, SSDNow E100, SSDNow KC100, SSDNow V+200, SSDNow V300
• Corsair Force Series
• OCZ Vertex 3, Agility 3, RevoDrive
• And many others...

Personally, I was a big fan of Zip Drives back in the day when 56K dial-up was fast and our Macs came in bright, candy colors . But Zip Drives sure take a beating in this article.

The topic is the worst storage mediums [sic] of all time and it's hosted by ExtremeTech. Zip Drives take some abuse, as does reel to reel tape, but there are some surprises too. Not surprisingly, the article concludes on a sense of optimism, in this glorious age where everything you produce can be safely and securely stored in your butt .

Looks like Sony and Panasonic are teaming up again for the new Archival Disc format. The new disk format will premier at 300 GB with plans to increase to 1 TB using signal processing advancements. Double sided, 3 layers each side, and 405 nm optical wavelength - maybe these new 4K TVs will finally have some 4K source media.

Anandtech is running an article about a spacious new 5TB enterprise HDD from Toshiba. 3.5 inch, 7200 RPM, 128 MiB, either SATA or SAS 6Gb/s.