Items tagged with Western Digital
Western Digital this week pulled the wraps off the latest entry in its entry-level PCIe SSD family with the WD Blue SN570. As you might have already surmised from its naming, the WD Blue SN570 is the successor to the existing WD Blue SN550 lineup. To hit lower price points, the WD Blue SN570 SSDs feature a DRAM-less design and use the PCIe 3.0 interface (instead of the newer PCIe 4.0 interface used by the WD_Black family). Western Digital hasn’t provided any details on the controller used in the new SSDs, but it is paired with BiCS 5 3D TLC NAND flash. Given the PCIe 3.0 x4 interface, you won’t reach lofty 7,000 MB/sec read speeds like the WD_Black SN850. Instead, sequential reads...
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If you’re in the market for storage for a wide range of devices, Amazon is currently running a sweet promotion on SanDisk and Western Digital products. Depending on your needs, the discounts come in as low as 20 percent and can hit as high as 52 percent. The biggest discount can be found on the SanDisk 1TB Ultra microSDXC card. This is a UHS-1 compliant device that offers read speeds at up to 120MB/sec. You can use these cards in tablets, laptops, camera, or smartphones (even though the microSDXC slot seem to be going the way of the headphone jack these days). The card is typically priced at $229.99 but is discounted by 52 percent to $109.99 with free shipping (and returns). If you can...
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Western Digital announced plans to incorporate iNAND universal flash storage (UFS) embedded flash drives (EFDs) into its upcoming hard disk drives (HDDs) to enable increasingly larger capacities and improved performance, among other benefits. The name for this is OptiNAND, and it underpins Western Digital's storage roadmap up to around 50TB. That's a lot of storage space. Interestingly, this announcement comes the heels of a report that Western Digital and Noxia might combine forces to form a $20 billion NAND flash goliath. Not to be confused with a cache buffer or volatile DRAM, this is something entirely different. Western Digital also swats away any notion of this being a hybrid HDD design,...
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Drive makers have gotten into the unfortunate habit of swapping out key components that can potentially affect the performance of any particular solid state drive model, which introduces a sort of luck-of-the-draw factor for the buyer. Western Digital recently did this with its value-oriented Blue SN550 NVMe SSD. After catching some heat, WD has promised to update the drive model whenever it does something similar in the future. As we noted in our WD Blue SN550 review, it is a superb option in the budget NVMe SSD sector. The drives are rated to reach 2,400MB/s of sequential read performance and 1,950MB/s of sequential write performance, both of which run circles around what you can get on the...
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Western Digital and Kioxia might combine forces to give Samsung a serious run in the NAND flash memory sector. While nothing has been announced, it's said the two firms are in "advanced" discussions about a stock merger valued at $20 billion. A deal could potentially be reached within the next several weeks (before October). Sources who are apparently familiar with the situation claim the talks have been going on for some time now, and recently reached a fever pitch, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The idea being discussed is having Western Digital finance the merger with stock. Western Digital boss David Goeckeler would probably run the outfit. If this happens, it would be...
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We’ve got another round of hot deals for you today, and they cover a rather eclectic range of tech products. You can find discounts on the latest M1 Mac Mini, Google’s venerable Pixel 3 XL, and Western Digital/SanDisk storage products. Apple M1 Mac Mini Up To $150 Off At Amazon The Mac mini was last refreshed in late October, and it received the highly acclaimed M1 (Apple Silicon) SoC at that time. This brain transplant gave the entry-level Mac a significant boost in performance over its Intel-based predecessor. Today, Amazon is discounting the base Mac mini (8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) to $649 instead of the $699 MSRP. However, an additional $49.01 discount at checkout takes it down to just...
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Imagine paying a premium for a blazing fast PCI Express 4.0 solid state drive only to discover that it coughs up a hairball on your specific PC platform. Sour grapes, right? Well, that is the situation some owners of X570 motherboards found themselves in when slapping a WD Black SN850 SSD into their PC, but fortunately there is now a fix available. Let's back up a moment. The issue garnered attention last month when users noticed a precipitous drop in write performance—over 43 percent, according to some online benchmark data. To be fair, this decline in write performance did not make the SSD slow (it was still hitting speeds of around 3,000MB/s), just slower than it should have been (it's...
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When we stumble across PC components deals, they typically come from online retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg, or various other well-known names. It's not often that the device's actual manufacturer provides the best price to consumers. Western Digital is bucking that trend today with a killer deal on its fastest-available SSD: the WD_Black 1TB SN850. The 1TB SN850 has an MSRP of $229.99, and it carries that price if you shop over at Best Buy. At Newegg and Amazon, the SSD is priced at $200.68 and $205.99, respectively. However, the Western Digital store is currently selling the SSD for a low $179.99 with free shipping, a hefty $50 discount. For those that need a refresher, the SN850 uses...
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Today is World Backup Day, which means that there are some great deals to be found on storage devices if you're in need. Amazon is currently discounting SSDs -- both internal and external -- from companies like Samsung and SanDisk/Western Digital. Internal SATA-III And PCIe SSDs While these wouldn't traditionally be considered "backup" devices, we're not going to a let a good deal go to waste. Samsung has the most discounted SSDs available across SATA-III and PCIe interfaces. The fastest Samsung SSDs on sale are the 1TB and 2TB versions of the 980 Pro (discounted up to 22 percent), which feature sequential read speeds of up to 7,000 MB/s. Samsung 980 PRO 2TB PCIe NVMe Gen4 (MZ-V8P1T0B)...
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Spinning hard disks are completely out for just about all but the very cheapest of systems. Solid state drives like the WD Blue SN550 we'll be evaluating in this article are here to stay, and continue to make their way into lower-priced, ever more affordable notebooks and desktops. That's no doubt due to the fact that these drives' asking prices have consistently dropped year over year. In 2020, there hasn't been much good news on the affordable, widely-available PC hardware front, but SSD availability has been one bright spot. There's never been a better time to grab an SSD to speed up any PC still chugging along with magnetic media. Western Digital isn't a newcomer to solid state storage,...
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Black Friday might technically be a couple of weeks away, but you can start saving on various purchases right now. We have been highlighting different tantalizing deals that have appeared early, like 70-inch TVs priced as low as $399, and a free Google Stadia bundle for YouTube Premium subscribers. And the deals keep coming. If it is a storage product you are after, a bunch of WD and SanDisk media is marked down by up to 60 percent ahead of Black Friday. Be advised that, as currently advertised, these are a collection of "Epic Daily Deals," meaning they are one-day discounts. It is possible some of the same products will get marked down again this month, but if you see something that catches...
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Western Digital is dialing up the performance with a few new SSDs aimed at enthusiasts. These include the WD_Black SN850, the WD_Black AN1500, and the WD_Black D50 Game Drive, which all take different approaches to delivering blistering data transfer speeds. Starting off with the SN850, this is a standard NVMe M.2 SSD that uses the PCIe 4.0 interface. As you might expect from a PCIe 4.0-based SSD, Western Digital is quoting sweet sequential read speeds of up to 7,000MB/sec, while sequential writes come in at 5,300MB/sec (2TB SKU). The SN850 will be available in both a standard version, and an optional version with a heatsink to reduce thermal throttling and RGB lighting effects. Western Digital...
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In the days of old, important files were kept in locked file cabinets, and the really important stuff would be secured inside a safe. And to some extent, that is still the case today. However, nearly everything is digitized these days, and so Western Digital is launching its new ArmorLock security platform to keep sensitive data away from prying eyeballs. For the time being, this is not something that the typical home consumer needs to worry about—Aunt Mabel's passed-down cookie recipe might be a hit at school bake sales, but data thieves have bigger targets. Those targets exist within finance, government, healthcare, IT enterprise, legal, and media and entertainment industries, and that's...
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External storage is convenient, but it does not have to be slow, not with the advent of fast NAND flash memory and solid state drives housed in fancy enclosures. Case in point, Western Digital on Thursday launched a new My Passport SSD solution offered in capacities of up to 2 terabytes, with transfer speeds exceeding 1,000 megabytes per second. We have not tested these storage solutions yet, but according to Western Digital, its new My Passport SSDs can fling reads and writes at up to 1,050MB/s (1.05GB/s) and 1,000MB/s (1GB/s), respectively. Not too shabby at all. Even better, those speed claims apply to all three capacity options, including 2TB, 1TB, and 500GB. "The new My Passport SSD delivers...
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We have been hearing about massive capacity hard drives in the neighborhood of 18TB (and even higher) for several months now, but they have remained elusive products. Not anymore, apparently. An online retailer in the UK is now accepting orders for Western Digital's 18TB and 16TB Gold HDDs, neither of which have actually been announced yet. The landing page on Western Digital's website for its Gold series still lists capacities ranging from 1TB to 14TB, and nothing bigger. That said, we can tell you that the new 18TB and 16TB models are aimed at enterprise customers, as these storage drives are designed to withstand the rigors of 24x7 usage. "WD Gold has sophisticated monitoring electronics that...
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If you're looking to expand the storage available on your smartphone, add a new Secure Digital card for your D-SLR, a new internal SSD four a desktop, or a capacious external HDD for a growing media library, then Amazon has you covered today. The online retail giant has just posted some rather hot deals on SanDisk and Western Digital products that seemingly cover every potential storage device that you may possibly need. If you're looking for Secure Digital or microSD storage solutions, there are a number of deals available: SanDisk 256GB Ultra MicroSDXC @ $27.99 SanDisk Ultra 400GB MicroSDXC @ $44.79 SanDisk 512GB Extreme MicroSDXC @ $87.99 SanDisk 1TB Extreme MicroSDXC @...
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Western Digital is one of the biggest names in storage, and today the company announced it has developed its 5th generation 3D NAND flash memory technology called BiCS5. It is latterly denser than the previous generation of 3D NAND, and also offers more storage layers—112 of them, to be precise. These are important traits because they ensure companies can continue to crank out more capacious storage drives. There is also a performance benefit. According to Western Digital, its 112-layer BiCS5 3D NAND flash memory offers 40 percent more bits per wafer and up to 50 percent more input-output (I/O) performance than its previous generation 96-layer BiCS4 memory. "As we move into the next decade,...
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If you're in the market for a capacious external hard drive to ease the load off your blazing fast SSD for archiving files, Amazon has a deal running today that might just be right up your alley. The online retailer is discounting the Western Digital 8TB Elements external HDD by a whopping $65 (36 percent off), taking it down to a low $114.99. A quick price check shows that this is the lowest price that we've ever seen for the 8TB external hard drive. The 8TB Essentials HDD is a no-frills storage device with a USB 3.0 interface (USB 2.0 compatible) and is plug-and-play compatible with both Windows and macOS (although you’ll probably want to reformat it from the default NTFS). In the box,...
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Remember when storage was measured in megabytes? Yeah, those days are (thankfully) long behind us, as we've raced past gigabytes and into the terabyte era. Maybe petabyte storage will be the norm one day. In the here and now, though, Western Digital just upped the ante by introducing two new high-capacity hard drives for enterprise and hyperscale cloud customers. One is the 20TB Ultrastar DC HC650 and the other is the 18TB Ultrastar DC HC550. Both new models represent WD's first commercial implementation of energy-assisted magnetic recording technology at scale, to deliver higher area density and storage efficiency. They are also durable and reliable, according to WD (which is always a good thing...
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Western Digital today announced its new WD Blue SN550 family of SSDs, which will in effect replace the existing SN500 SKUs. These aren't the company's highest-performing storage solutions, but they do offer a compelling balance of good performance at reasonable price points for those looking to replace a HDD or simply build a low-cost gaming rig. WD SN550 SSDs uses a 4-lane PCIe 3.0 interface along with a Western Digital-designed SSD controller and an in-house 96-layer 3D TLC NAND. Although these are considered entry-level PCIe SSDs, they offer a significant boost in performance over Western Digital's existing SATA products, with the company citing a 4x uplift in read speeds. Western...
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Western Digital is looking to "Paint it Black" with a new family of WD_Black external storage devices targeted squarely at gamers. With the WD_Black label affixed, you can expect to find excellent performance across-the-board, with the new products including one SSD-based device and four HDD-based devices. Let's get the super-fast SSD out the way first: the WD_Black P50 Game Drive. This is the first storage device in the industry to support the USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 port and offers read speeds of up to 2GB/sec. Western Digital says that the P50 Game Drive is available in capacities up to 2TB and comes backed with a 5-year warranty. Pricing has not yet been announced for the P50 Game Drive, but it will...
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Your Xbox One may not be easily portable, but that does not mean your games can’t be. Western Digital just announces its Gaming Drive Accelerated SSD for the Xbox One. The portable SSD allows players to store more games and load them more quickly. The Western Digital (WD) Gaming Drive Accelerated SSD is available in 500GB and 1TB capacities. The 1TB allows users to store up to 25 games. Both versions reportedly load games 50 percent at 400 MB/s read speeds. The SSD is compatible with the Xbox One S and Xbox One X and relies on a USB 3.0 connection. Most importantly, the SSD is portable. It measures 5 X 4 X 1.3 inches (127 X 101.6 X 33.03 millimeters) and weighs 0.2379 pounds (roughly 124.24...
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