In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, AMD quietly dropped distribution and support for the company’s StoreMI software at the start of this month. The technology, launched back in 2018, was AMD’s answer to Apple’s Fusion Drive and other hybrid drive programs that allow a SSD and a HDD to be merged into a single logical volume. However it looks like AMD has decided to take a different direction with their hybrid drive efforts, as the company has dropped the software in favor of another program that’s expected to be launched this quarter.
In a product change advisory published to their website last month (but only noticed recently), AMD announced that they would be halting the distribution of and support for the StoreMI software. The software itself would continue to work, but starting March 31st, but AMD wouldn’t be providing the means for any new installations after that date, nor would they be providing support.
A relatively clean break like this is rather uncommon for most CPU vendor software, but given what we know about StoreMI, it’s not too surprising. StoreMi came out of an existing relationship between AMD and Enmotus, a software developer who had already created their similar FuzeDrive software that AMD was, for a time, recommending for use with their systems. So while it’s ultimately an internal matter for AMD, it looks like the company has decided to wrap up their relationship with Enmotus – which would mean that AMD would no longer have the rights to distribute the software.
In its place, the PCA reveals that the company is “focus[ing] its internal development resources on a replacement solution,” which is set to be released this quarter. The fact that AMD is explicitly noting the use of “internal” resources, in turn, strongly suggests that whatever the company is working on, it’s an in-house solution rather than a licensed solution like StoreMi. Which means AMD has presumably started from scratch here, but it would also be a lot cleaner with respect to ownership and all the associated issues that come with it (StoreMi famously only allowed SSD partitions up to 256GB, in order to not undermine Enmotus’s commercial software).
At any rate, barring any delays, we should be seeing the fruits of AMD’s software labors in the next couple of months.