Items tagged with (NASDAQ:WDC)
Given all the hubbub concerning solid state drives (SSDs) these days, it's easy to forget that there's still a rather large market for traditional hard disk drives (HDDs). Western Digital clearly hasn't forgotten about the market, and is now claiming storage leadership with its new Ultrastar DC HC620. The Ultrastar DC HC620 is available in capacities of up to 15TB, which is just 1TB greater than the previous high watermark for currently shipping HDDs. The Ultrastar DC HC620 makes use of a 3.5-inch form-factor (SAS and SATA interface are available) and leverages second-generation...
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Western Digital (WD) has pulled the wraps off a new high capacity storage drive that is aimed directly at cloud and enterprise data centers. The new Ultrastar DC HC530 has 14TB of storage capacity, which WD says is the highest capacity conventional magnetic recording hard drive on the market today. The HC530 uses fifth-generation HelioSeal technology and is meant to be perfect for environments where storage density, watt/TB and $/TB are critical. The drive will allow enterprise users to build petabyte-scale infrastructures. WD says that the new HC530 is a follow-on to the 14TB shielded magnetic...
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Last week, Western Digital pulled the wraps off a new WD Black NVMe PCIe SSDaimed at gamers. Today, the company has a new range of SSDs aimed at video producers that need large capacities and ultra-fast speeds for offloading their footage. The three external SSDs all use the high-speed Thunderbolt 3 interface and encompass the G-Technology D-DRIVE and G-SPEED product families. The G-DRIVE Mobile Pro offers sustained transfer rate of up to 2,800MB/sec, allowing you to transfer a terabyte of data in seven minutes or less. The drive itself is ready for rough and tumble activity with its shock-resistant...
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There is no shortage of options when it comes to fast solid-state drives to enhance the storage subsystem on our gaming rigs. Western Digital is adding to the mix with the new WD Black 3D NVMe SSD, which is specifically being aimed at gamers. The SSD family is available in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities, and offers incredible performance across the board. The 250GB SKU offers sequential reads/writes of up to 3,000 MB/sec and 1,600 MB/sec respectively, and random read/write performance of up to 220,000/170,000 IOPs. The 1TB SKU is the speed demon of the family, with sequential read/writes of 3,400...
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Western Digital is rolling out a pair of solid state drives that take aim at both the Internet of Things (IoT) and "Fast Data" applications markets. The company's new PC SN720 and PC SN520. The new drives feature three-dimensional (3D) NAND flash memory underneath the hood and "groundbreaking" new firmware and controller architecture purpose built to leverage those chips. They're also incredibly fast. Starting with the PC SN720, Western Digital plans to ship the drive in 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities on a single-sided M.2 2280 form factor, which means it's one of those fancy gum stick-sized...
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In April 2013, cloud storage provider Backblaze kicked off what would immediately become a tradition. Each year, the company analyzes an incredible amount of data collected over the course of the year to give the rest of us an impression on which hard drive vendors come out ahead, and which fall behind. In other words, it's a polite way of analyzing which vendor "is more likely to lose your data". In Q4 of last year, Backblaze had 91,243 hard drives in operation, a number which excludes boot drives and a few others that couldn't meet the company's criteria of having at least 45 drives of one model...
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We are big fans of network attached storage (NAS) solutions, which in recent years have become far more sophisticated and capable. Western Digital's My Cloud products have generally been a solid option in the NAS arena. Unfortunately, it was recently discovered that several My Cloud devices were susceptible to a backdoor vulnerability that could allow an attacker to gain unauthorized root access. Fortunately, WD is working to resolve the issue. WD acknowledged the security holes in a blog post, saying that critical issues that were brought up in some recent articles were addressed last year with...
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Western Digital might be best known for its mechanical hard drives, but the company has not ignored the solid state drive movement. Proving that to be the case, WD unveiled a couple of SSD products at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, including the My Passport Wireless SSD under its own branding, and the Extreme Portable SSD under its SanDisk label, which it purchased in 2015 for $19 billion. Interestingly, WD is pitching both products at "avid photographers and drone enthusiasts" who are in need of durable and high-performance media capture solutions. Starting with the My Passport Wireless...
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In case you have noticed, our data storage needs are growing at an exponential rate. Data centers have an increasing need to store huge amounts of information to power our digital world. Although there is an increasing shift towards solid state drive (SSDs) for their blazing fast performance and low-power profile, hard disk drive (HDDs) still carry the brunt of the load when it comes to storage currently and in the immediate future. According to Western Digital, roughly 70 percent of the thousands of exabytes of data globally will reside on HDDs, versus 30 percent for flash. When focusing solely...
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The need for more bulk storage isn't slowing down, and in fact continues to grow at an incredible rate. At one point, a 4TB hard drive seemed like it offered a ton of digital breathing room. Today, that's not so much the case. As we capture our photos and videos at higher resolutions (8K is right around the corner), many users will reach a point where they feel they simply can't have enough storage. And that's to say nothing of the insatiable appetite for storage in the enterprise and data center. Earlier this year, HGST blew our minds when it began shipping its first 12TB hard drive, the...
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Western Digital has tossed a new portable storage solution onto the market that photography pros and amateurs alike will appreciate if they are working with large file sizes. The drive is marketed by G-Technology and is called the G-Drive mobile SSD R-Series. The portable drive is aimed primarily at professional photographers, enabling them to offload high-resolution photos and 4K video at 560 MB/s over the USB-C interface. G-Technology says that the fast 560MB/s transfer speed is enough to allow content creators to work with large files in real time. The "R" in the name stands for rugged, because...
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If you’re in the market for a ridiculous amount of external storage for your computer, Western Digital has you covered with the latest entry in its My Book Duo storage family. The company announced that it is now offering a 20TB model, which features two 10TB drives operated in RAID. RAID-1 mode will allow you to mirror the drives for extra redundancy (and peace of mind), leaving you with just 10TB of capacity between the two HDDs within the external enclosure. However, RAID-0 mode enables striping to spread data across both drives, helping to improve overall performance. According to Western Digital,...
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This week at Computex, Western Digital announced its first line of consumer SSDs that are based on 64-layer 3D NAND memory. Western Digital is marketing the new SSDs under both its WD Blue 3D and SanDisk Ultra 3D families, and aside from labeling, they appear to feature identical specifications. All of the SSDs will be available in 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities, and all use a SATA 6Gb/sec interface — so don’t expect to see the insane read and write speeds typically associated with NVMe PCIe SSDs that are increasingly becoming popular in the consumer space. Instead, sequential read speeds...
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Western Digital’s popular WD Red and WD Red Pro storage families are expanding once again, this time moving into 10TB territory (up from the previous high of 8GB). As you might expect with today’s high-capacity hard disk drives, the latest entries are filled with helium (branded HelioSeal in Western Digital parlance) to reduce platter drag and thus improve performance. Given the “Red” designation, these new HDDs are optimized for NAS environments and incorporate 3D Active Balance Plus technology to improve performance and reliability. The WD Red spins at 5400RPM, features 128MB of cache, and is...
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