Items tagged with WD
Western Digital recently launched a new family of NVMe-based solid state drives targeting gamers and enthusiasts. The simply-branded WD Black NVMe SSD family has a similar naming convention to some previous-generation solid state drives built by the company, but these latest offerings are packing some new technology and offer performance much higher than any of the earlier WD-made storage product offerings that came before it. The WD Black NVMe SSD family features a new controller, 64-layer BiCS3 3D TLC NAND flash memory, an intelligently laid-out PCB that optimizes thermal characteristics, and...
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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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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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WD recently updated its mainstream Blue line of solid state drives with new 64-layer 3D BiCS NAND flash memory. When we first took a look at the original WD Blue SSD, we found it to be an admirable performer with competitive pricing. This new generation of drives, however, promises better performance and features all of the firmware tweaks and optimizations WD has gleaned over the Blue SSD line’s lifetime.In addition, SanDisk branded versions of the drive are hitting the market as well. Internally the WD Blue with 3D NAND and new SanDisk Ultra 3D are virtually identical, but the drives will target...
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Western Digital is the king of the hard drive market but up to now has been a non-factor in SSDs. However, with its purchase of solid state storage giant, SanDisk, the company immediately leaped to the forefront of the market in one fell swoop. Now the company is entering the consumer/commercial SSD market with WD Green and WD Blue SSDs, using a naming scheme borrowed from its hard drive line and technology acquired from SanDisk. WD's Green lineup is for entry level PCs meant to have a low power draw while the Blue SSD series is aimed at mainstream consumers. Both series are available...
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After looking into the matter, the European Commission has given Western Digital its blessing to complete the company's proposed acquisition of rival SanDisk. Regulators ultimately decided that the pairing of two U.S. storage giants would not adversely affect competition in Europe, in part because the overlap between the two manufacturers is effectively limited to flash memory storage products in the enterprise space. "I am pleased that we have been able to ensure that this multi-billion dollar deal in a fast-developing industry can go ahead without delay. We have worked efficiently, in cooperation...
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Considering the fact that Western Digital just made a mammoth acquisition, I'm sure it would have preferred that bad news surrounding some of its products could have come out at any other time. Nonetheless, anyone that purchased a My Passport external hard drive between 2007 and 2013 and has been taking advantage of its built-in security features will want to take note. According to research conducted by Gunnar Alendal, Christian Kison, and modg, we've learned that all My Passport drives manufactured between those years have a gaping flaw that renders their built-in encryption pretty much useless....
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We've come a long way since the days when hard drives were measured in megabytes. Underscoring that point is the industry's first 10TB enterprise-class HDD, the host-managed Ultrastar Archive Ha10 SMR built by HGST, a division of Western Digital. HGST says the capacious HDD is intended of next-generation archive applications. The 10TB monster is a helium-based drive, the third of its kind by HGST in the past two years. HGST says it's deployed over a million helium-based HelioSeal HDDs to date and is super confident in the technology's reliability. In the task the new drive was purpose built for...
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Two And A Half Geeks 5/14/2015: Broadwell NUC w/ Iris Pro, ASUS T300 Chi, Samsung Galaxy S6 and More
In this latest episode of HotHardware’s Two and a Half Geeks, Dave, Marco, and long-time HH tech editor extraordinaire, Paul Lilly, discuss Intel's latest 18-core Xeons, the Broadwell NUC with Iris Pro and the Compute Stick, the slick Asus T300 Chi ultrabook, Samsung’s Galaxy S 6 and LG’s G4, our awesome Syber giveaway, which is running until the end of the month, and much more... Show Notes: 02:00 - Intel Launches Xeon E7-8800 and E7-4800 v3 Processor Families 08:33 - Asus Transformer Book T300 Chi 2-in-1 Ultrabook Review 18:43 - Intel Compute Stick PC Review: Tiny, Sleek, And...
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The WD My Cloud EX2100 is a new prosumer-oriented NAS drive from WD that continues the company's adventures in the realm of "personal cloud" storage. These drives are aimed directly at people who use Cloud storage such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.com, and others. The marketing speak from WD is that those services require a monthly payment for a small amount of storage, and you have to store your data on someone else's cloud. For example Dropbox charges $10 a month for 1TB of storage, and Google charges the same. WD's pitch is you can get multiple terabytes of storage with one of its drives, and...
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Western Digital ended the work week by rolling out four new network attached storage (NAS) solutions split into two product segments -- the My Cloud Expert Series consisting of the My Cloud EX2100 (two-bay solution) and My Cloud EX4100 (four-bay solution), and the My Cloud Business Series with the My Cloud DL2100 (two-bay) and My Cloud DL4100 (four-bay).The My Cloud EX2100 and EX4100 sport the latest versions of the dual-core ARMADA processor (385 and 388) and offer top-class read and write speeds for simultaneous, high-performance HD media streaming and up to 24TB of storage capacity, WD says.Both...
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The Western Digital Passport Wireless is a member of a new class of storage devices that combine run-of-the-mill USB storage with wireless hotspot and media center functionality. These devices essentially marry what used to be two separate drives - an external USB device and a media device that can stream data wirelessly to connected devices. They also help address the relatively small amount of storage that is included with today's mobile devices, as they let you store and access terabytes of data on your smartphone or tablet without having to store it locally. It's an interesting combination,...
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Storage guru Western Digital on Wednesday expanded its business-class NAS (Network Attached Storage) portfolio with the WD Sentinel DX4200 storage server powered by an Intel Atom C2338 dual-core processor. Western Digital is pitching its latest box as a complete solution using Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 workgroup operating system The WD Sentinel DX4200 features a four-bay design with tool-less and tray-less installation. It supports up to 16TB of capacity, and the drives are also hot swappable -- if an HDD goes down for whatever reason, you can swap it out with a new one without skipping a...
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I've been a fan of WD's My Passport series of external hard drives for some time, but with some wireless drives having come and gone over the past couple of years, I could never help but wonder where on earth the WD option was. Well, that question has now been answered, with the just-announced and appropriately-named WD My Passport Wireless. WD's tagline for the Wireless is "Every device. One drive. No wires.", which does a great job of explaining what the drive is all about. Under the hood is a 500GB, 1TB, or 2TB hard drive, along with an 802.11n 2x2 Wi-Fi adapter. As with most wireless storage,...
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