Western Digital
Western Digital has introduced its new series of SSDs aimed at mainstream PCs, which combine high performance and low cost. The Western Digital PC SN5000S family of DRAM-less drives uses the company's 3D QLC NAND memory and an in-house-developed platform, so the SSDs promise to be relatively inexpensive. Meanwhile, their sequential read performance reaches 6,000 MB/s. Western Digital's PC SN5000S drives are based on the company's latest in-house controller, which supports a PCIe 4.0 x4 host interface and BICS6 3D QLC NAND memory. The controller fully supports Western Digital's nCache 4.0 HybridSLC technology with endurance monitoring to ensure decent performance, RSA-3K and SHA-384 encryption, and TCG Opal 2.02 and Pyrite security capabilities. On the capacity side, Western Digital's PC SN5000S drives will be available in 512...
SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD v2 and WD My Passport SSD (2020) Review
External bus-powered storage devices have grown both in storage capacity as well as speeds over the last decade. Thanks to rapid advancements in flash technology (including the advent of...
7 by Ganesh T S on 9/30/2020Western Digital Unveils USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 SanDisk Extreme PRO Portable SSD v2
The SanDisk Extreme PRO Portable SSD released in 2019 has been one of the top performers in the external flash storage market segment. Putting a high-end WD Black SN750-class...
14 by Ganesh T S on 9/30/2020Western Digital Expands Purple Surveillance Storage Options with 18TB HDD and 1TB microSDXC Models
Western Digital has been marketing their surveillance-focused storage solutions under the Purple branding since 2014. After the SanDisk acquisition, the company started selling WD Purple microSDXC cards as a...
15 by Ganesh T S on 9/23/2020Western Digital Updates Red Pro Line with 16 and 18TB Capacity Points
Western Digital recently unveiled their first energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) HDDs for the retail channel. Today, the company is taking advantage of the same hardware platform with some tweaks...
9 by Ganesh T S on 9/23/2020Western Digital Launches Security Platform for Portable Storage with G-Technology's ArmorLock-Encrypted NVMe SSD
Data safety is of paramount importance for many enterprise use-cases, and in certain scenarios, for home consumers too. Portable storage devices have typically offered data protection in the form...
4 by Ganesh T S on 9/3/2020Western Digital's USB 3.1 Gen 2 WD My Passport SSD Gets an NVMe Refresh
Western Digital's lineup of direct-attached storage (DAS) products targets a range of markets and form-factors. After the acquisition of HGST / G-Technology and SanDisk, the company now offers similar...
20 by Ganesh T S on 8/20/2020The Next Step in SSD Evolution: NVMe Zoned Namespaces Explained
In June we saw an update to the NVMe standard. The update defines a software interface to assist in actually reading and writing to the drives in a way...
46 by Billy Tallis on 8/6/2020Western Digital's 16TB and 18TB Gold Drives: EAMR HDDs Enter the Retail Channel
Western Digital made a number of announcements yesterday related to their enterprise hard-disk drives (HDD) product lines. While there was nothing unexpected in terms of the products being announced...
72 by Ganesh T S on 7/9/2020Western Digital Announces Ultrastar DC SN840 Dual-Port NVMe SSD
Western Digital is introducing a new high-end enterprise NVMe SSD, the Ultrastar DC SN840, and a NVMe over Fabrics 2U JBOF using up to 24 of these SSDs. The Ultrastar...
25 by Billy Tallis on 6/24/2020Dell & HPE Issue Updates to Fix 40K Hour Runtime Flaw in Enterprise SSDs
In a second SSD snafu in as many years, Dell and HPE have revealed that the two vendors have shipped enterprise drives with a critical firmware bug, one will...
51 by Anton Shilov on 3/27/2020SanDisk Launches Max Endurance microSD Cards: 3 to 15 Years Warranty
In a world where NAND storage density, capacity, and low cost matter the most, key metrics that take a back seat include endurance and retention rates. For users who...
22 by Anton Shilov on 3/19/2020Western Digital Introduces WD Gold Enterprise SSDs
On what would have been the first day of the Open Compute Project's annual Global Summit, Western Digital is bringing out a new line of enterprise SSDs. The WD...
20 by Billy Tallis on 3/4/2020UFS 3.1 Storage Devices for Smartphones Unveiled by Kioxia & Western Digital
Less than a month after JEDEC published its UFS 3.1 specification, Kioxia and Western Digital have introduced their first UFS 3.1-compliant storage devices for smartphones. Samples of Kioxia’s UFS...
2 by Anton Shilov on 3/2/2020The Road to 80 TB HDDs: Showa Denko Develops HAMR Platters for Hard Drives
Showa Denko K.K. (SDK) has unveiled the the company has finished the development of its next-generation heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) media for hard drives. The platters use all-new...
81 by Anton Shilov on 2/6/2020Quantum to Acquire Western Digital’s ActiveScale Business
Quantum has announced that it had agreed to acquire ActiveScale object storage business from Western Digital. Western Digital’s ActiveScale cloud storage solutions are used to store unstructured data that...
9 by Anton Shilov on 2/5/2020Western Digital Roadmap Updates: Energy Assisted Recording, Multi-Stage Actuators, Zoned Storage
Between CES at the beginning of the month, a series of presentations at Storage Field Day last week and a quarterly earnings report this week, we've heard from just...
115 by Billy Tallis on 1/31/2020Western Digital and Kioxia Announce BiCS5 112-Layer 3D NAND
Western Digital and Kioxia have announced the successful development of their newest generation of 3D NAND flash memory. Their fifth-generation BiCS 3D NAND has commenced production in the form...
19 by Billy Tallis on 1/30/2020Fire At Kioxia & Western Digital NAND Fab - Impact on Supply to be Minimal
Kioxia has reportedly informed its customers that a production tool at one of its fabs caught fire early on Tuesday. The fire was promptly extinguished and no casualties were...
6 by Anton Shilov on 1/8/2020Western Digital Demonstrates 8TB Portable 20 Gbps SSD, Announces Dual-Connector 1TB Thumb Drive
Western Digital has a history of showcasing cutting-edge technological advancements in the consumer electronics space at CES every year. In 2019, a 4TB thumb drive was demonstrated, and this...
12 by Ganesh T S on 1/6/2020Western Digital Begins to Sample 18 TB & 20 TB ‘Energy Assisted’ Hard Drives
Western Digital has started partner sampling of its 18 TB and 20 TB energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) drives. The HDDs utilize WD's up and coming EAMR tech to further...
23 by Anton Shilov on 12/23/2019