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 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 6/24/2020

Dell & 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 3/27/2020

SanDisk 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 3/19/2020

Western 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 3/4/2020

UFS 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 3/2/2020

The 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 2/6/2020

Quantum 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

Western 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 1/31/2020

Western 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 1/30/2020

Fire 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 1/8/2020

Western 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 1/6/2020

Western 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

Western Digital Rolls-Out Two New SweRV RISC-V Cores For Microcontrollers

Western Digital has added two new processor cores — the SweRV Core EH2 and the SweRV Core EL2 — into its SweRV portfolio of microcontroller CPUs. And, keeping in...

14 by Anton Shilov on 12/13/2019

Western Digital: Expect More Energy-Assisted Tech For 24 TB & Beyond

Western Digital has been promoting its microwave assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) technology for over a couple of years now, yet surprisingly, its upcoming 18 TB and 20 TB drives...

12 by Anton Shilov on 12/12/2019

Western Digital Announces WD Blue SN550 SSD

Western Digital is refreshing their NVMe-based WD Blue product line, replacing the WD Blue SN500 with the new WD Blue SN550. The SN550 updates both the controller and NAND...

15 by Billy Tallis on 12/10/2019

Western Digital Starts Sales of WD_Black P50 USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 SSDs

Western Digital has started sales of its WD_Black P50 SSDs that were announced earlier this year. The drives are aimed at the high-performance market and are among the first...

17 by Anton Shilov on 12/5/2019

Demand for HDD Storage Booming: 240 EB Shipped in Q3 2019

Demand for storage is stronger than ever as, in addition to growing user-generated data, machine-generated data now requires a formidable amount of storage space and will need even more...

30 by Anton Shilov on 11/18/2019

Western Digital Ultrastar DC SS540 SAS SSDs: Up to 15.36 TB, Up to 3 DWPD

Western Digital has introduced its new series of SSDs designed for mission critical applications, including OLTP, OLAP, hyper converged infrastructure (HCI), as well as software-defined storage (SDS) workloads. The...

21 by Anton Shilov on 11/6/2019

Western Digital Begins Shipments of 96-Layer 3D QLC-Based SSDs, Retail Products

Western Digital announced this week that it has started shipments of its first products based on 3D QLC NAND memory. The initial devices to use the highly-dense flash memory...

28 by Anton Shilov on 11/1/2019

Western Digital Launches WD Red SA500 Caching SSDs for NAS

Western Digital has introduced its new WD Red SA500 family of specialized SSDs, which are designed for caching data in NAS devices. The drives are available in four different...

27 by Anton Shilov on 10/31/2019

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