Western Digital
When Western Digital introduced its Ultrastar DC SN861 SSDs earlier this year, the company did not disclose which controller it used for these drives, which made many observers presume that WD was using an in-house controller. But a recent teardown of the drive shows that is not the case; instead, the company is using a controller from Fadu, a South Korean company founded in 2015 that specializes on enterprise-grade turnkey SSD solutions. The Western Digital Ultrastar DC SN861 SSD is aimed at performance-hungry hyperscale datacenters and enterprise customers which are adopting PCIe Gen5 storage devices these days. And, as uncovered in photos from a recent Storage Review article, the drive is based on Fadu's FC5161 NVMe 2.0-compliant controller. The FC5161 utilizes 16 NAND channels supporting...
Western Digital Introduces WD Red SN700: PCIe 3.0 M.2 NVMe SSDs for NAS Systems
Western Digital's Red series of drives for network-attached storage systems has a significant share in various NAS market segments. The series started off with a focus on hard drives...
24 by Ganesh T S on 9/28/2021Western Digital Reimagines HDD - Flash Integration with OptiNAND
The last few years have seen plenty of new innovations come up in the hard-disk drive market. For quite some time, the HDD technology roadmap was shared industry-wide -...
51 by Ganesh T S on 8/31/2021SanDisk Extreme PRO and Crucial X6 4TB Portable SSDs Review: Contrasting High-Capacity Storage Options
The portable SSD market has been steadily expanding thanks to the increasing digital footprint of consumers. Technological advancements such as 3D NAND with high layer counts and the emergence...
20 by Ganesh T S on 8/18/2021Western Digital Unveils Multimedia-Focused SanDisk Professional Portfolio
Western Digital's G-Technology brand is well-known in multimedia production circles with products ranging from portable SSDs to multi-HDD RAID enclosures. As part of its Flash Perspective event today, the...
13 by Ganesh T S on 5/26/2021Western Digital Introduces WD Black SN750 SE SSD: Entry-Level PCIe Gen4
Among several announcements today, Western Digital is introducing a new more affordable PCIe Gen4 SSD under their gaming-oriented WD Black brand (styled WD_BLACK). The new WD Black SN750 SE...
14 by Billy Tallis on 5/26/2021Western Digital Introduces WD Black D30 Game Drive External SSDs
Western Digital is adding a new external SSD to their WD_BLACK product line: the WD Black D30 Game Drive SSD. The D30 is a bus-powered USB SSD offering up...
5 by Billy Tallis on 5/26/2021The Western Digital WD Black SN850 Review: A Very Fast PCIe 4.0 SSD
Western Digital has rapidly risen to being a top-tier player in the market, and this is no more evident than with their newest high-end SSD, the WD Black SN850.
83 by Billy Tallis on 3/18/20212021 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 7/9/2020