Western Digital
Western Digital expanded its WD Blue NVMe family of budget SSDs this week with the introduction of the the WD Blue SN5000 series, an updated lineup of SSDs that, among other things, adds a 4 TB model. Being budget drives, the SN5000 series is not going to be a performance monster, but their combination of capacity, reliability, and relatively low price could make them popular both among casual buyers and among enthusiasts looking for relatively cheap bulk solid-state storage. Western Digital's WD Blue SN500 NVMe drives come in an M.2-2280 form-factor and are based around an in-house WD controller (the company rarely discloses their codenames these days). WD's controller is a 4 channel, DRAMless design, which is what we typically see for budget and mainstream...
2021 NAND Flash Updates from ISSCC: The Leaning Towers of TLC and QLC
The annual IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference covers a range of topics of interest to AnandTech. Every year the conference includes a session on non-volatile memories where most of...
76 by Billy Tallis on 2/19/2021CES 2021: Western Digital's Portable SSDs Get Capacity Upgrades: 4TB of TLC for $680
Western Digital markets portable SSDs under different brands, catering to different market segments. The flagships in each brand make use of of very similar platforms - a M.2 NVMe...
3 by Ganesh T S on 1/11/2021Western Digital at FMS 2020: Zoned SSDs, Automotive NVMe And More
At Flash Memory Summit this week (online for the first time), Western Digital is showing off three new SSD products and have outlined the company's areas of strategic focus...
12 by Billy Tallis on 11/11/2020Western Digital Launches New WD Black NVMe SSDs And Thunderbolt Dock
Today Western Digital is announcing a major expansion of their WD Black family of gaming-oriented storage products. In a digital event later today on Twitch, Western Digital will introduce...
40 by Billy Tallis on 10/8/2020USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 State of the Ecosystem Review: Where Does 20Gbps USB Stand in 2020?
USB has emerged as the mainstream interface of choice for data transfer from computing platforms to external storage devices. Thunderbolt has traditionally been thought of as a high-end alternative...
81 by Ganesh T S on 10/5/2020SanDisk 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 2/5/2020