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...
WD My Passport 5TB DAS Review: Compact and Consistent Capacity Champ Gets SMR Right
Cost-conscious consumers with bulk storage requirements need to rely on hard drives. On the portable front, HDD vendors have been using 2.5" drives in external bus-powered enclosures to serve...
27 by Ganesh T S on 10/3/2019Western Digital to Exit Storage Systems: Sells Off IntelliFlash Division
Western Digital this week announced that it has made a strategic decision to leave the market for dedicated storage systems, as further development of its IntelliFlash and ActiveScale businesses...
8 by Anton Shilov on 9/20/2019Western Digital Launches iNAND IX EM132: eMMC SSDs For Embedded Industrial Applications
Western Digital this week has introduced its first family of embedded eMMC storage devices for industrial and IoT applications. Based on the company's 64-layer BiCS3 3D TLC NAND memory...
4 by Anton Shilov on 9/20/2019Western Digital Reveals 18 TB DC HC550 'EAMR' Hard Drive
Marking an important step in the development of next-generation hard drive technology, Western Digital has formally announced the company’s first hard drives based on energy-assisted magnetic recording. Starting things...
48 by Anton Shilov on 9/18/2019Western Digital 20 TB HDD: Crazy Capacity for Cold Storage
As operators of cloud datacenters need more storage capacity, higher capacity HDDs are being developed. As data hoarders need more capacity, higher capacity HDDs are needed. Last week Western...
50 by Anton Shilov on 9/11/2019Western Digital Reveals Ultrastar DC SN340 SSDs for Read Intensive Workloads
Western Digital has introduced its new accelerator drives designed for very read-intensive workloads. The key feature of the Ultrastar DC SN340 Very Read Intensive (VRI) SSDs is their low...
5 by Anton Shilov on 8/7/2019Western Digital Unveils Ultrastar DC SN640 SSDs: Up to 30.72 TB Capacity
Western Digital has announced its new family of enterprise SSDs aimed at mixed-use-case workloads. The new drives use in-house developed components and come in EDSFF E1.L, U.2, and M.2-22110...
14 by Anton Shilov on 8/7/2019Western Digital: Nearly All NAND Capacities Resumed Normal Operations
Western Digital and its manufacturing partner Toshiba Memory Co. (TMC) had managed to resume normal operation of almost all of their joint production lines at their Yokkaichi Operations campus...
31 by Anton Shilov on 8/1/2019Western Digital’s Ultrastar DC HC330: A 10 TB HDD for Enterprises w/ 40% Faster Writes
Western Digital has introduced its new top-of-the-range air-filled hard drive for enterprises that use storage servers, RAID arrays, and distributed storage. The Ultrastar DC HC330 HDD expands the capacities...
9 by Anton Shilov on 7/23/2019Western Digital Unveils IntelliFlash N5100: An Entry-Level All-Flash Storage System
Western Digital has introduced its most affordable NVMe all-flash storage array, the new IntelliFlash N5100. The device offers up to 92 TB of raw NAND flash using SN200 NVMe...
17 by Anton Shilov on 7/19/2019SanDisk’s Extreme Pro NVMe 3D SSD Gains Capacity: Up to 2 TB
Western Digital has quietly expanded its SanDisk Extreme Pro M.2 NVMe 3D SSD range with a 2 TB model. The drive offers performance on par with other models in...
7 by Anton Shilov on 7/12/2019Toshiba & WD NAND Production Hit By Power Outage: 6 Exabytes Lost
Toshiba Memory and Western Digital on Friday disclosed that an unexpected power outage in the Yokkaichi province in Japan on June 15 affected the manufacturing facilities that are jointly...
150 by Anton Shilov on 6/28/2019Toshiba Memory & Western Digital Finalize Fab K1 Investment Agreement
Toshiba Memory and Western Digital on Friday announced that they had finalized a formal agreement regarding a joint investment in the K1 manufacturing facility near Kitakami, Iwate Prefecture, Japan...
1 by Anton Shilov on 5/20/2019SanDisk's First 1 TB microSD Card Now Available
Marking a new high in microSD card capacities, Western Digital has started shipping its flagship SanDisk Extreme 1 TB microSDXC card. This is the company's (and industry's) first 1...
22 by Anton Shilov on 5/16/2019Shipments of PC Hard Drives Predicted to Drop By Nearly 50% in 2019
According to a new financial presentation from Nidec, a Japanese motor manufacturer who is responsible for around 85% of all HDD spindle motors, the company believes that shipments of...
79 by Anton Shilov on 5/3/2019Western Digital Starts Shipments of Client SSDs Based on 96-Layer BICS4 3D NAND
Western Digital has been continuing to ramp up production of its 96-layer BICS4 3D NAND, and the company has already been using this flash memory for various retail storage...
10 by Anton Shilov on 5/1/2019Retailers Begin Listing 4 TB WD Blue SSD
A number of Austrian retailers have recently begun to list Western Digital’s as-yet-unannounced WD Blue 4 TB SSD. The drive features a SATA 6 Gbps interface and performance you...
25 by Anton Shilov on 4/29/2019LaCie Portable SSD and WD My Passport SSD Capsule Review: 2TB SATA SSDs Behind a USB Bridge
The emergence of 3D TLC flash has enabled a new class of budget-friendly bus-powered external SSDs. Flash memory has also seen a recent drop in prices, and this has...
5 by Ganesh T S on 4/19/2019The Western Digital WD Blue SN500 SSD Review: Moving The Mainstream To NVMe
Western Digital's latest generation of WD Blue SSDs jumps from SATA to NVMe, making some sacrifices in the process but still meeting the everyday needs of the typical consumer.
51 by Billy Tallis on 4/19/2019Western Digital: Over Half of Data Center HDDs Will Use SMR by 2023
Western Digital said at OCP Global Summit last week that over half of hard drives for data centers will use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology in 2023. At present...
33 by Anton Shilov on 3/19/2019