Items tagged with Western Digital
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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If you’re looking for high-speed internal storage that won’t break the bank, Western Digital has announced that its WD Blue SSD family is making a performance leap with the introduction of a new NVMe model. The company says that it is aiming these new SSDs at content creators and budget gamers who want a bit more performance than what SATA counterparts can currently offer. With respect to performance, Western Digital says that the new WD Blue SN500 SSDs deliver sequential read and write speeds of up to 1700MB/sec and 1450MB/sec respectively. As for random read/write performance, these figures come in at 275K IOPS and 300K IOPS respectively. According to Western Digital, this...
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The storage needs of smartphone users are not diminishing, they are only expanding with the advent of high resolution photography and 4K video. To account for this, Micron and Western Digital (through its SanDisk subsidiary) announced the industry's very first 1-terabyte capacity microSD storage cards for consumers. While both solutions offer the same amount of capacity, Western Digital's has the higher read performance rating——the 1TB SanDisk Extreme UHS-I microSDXC card is rated to hit read speeds of up to 160MB/s, whereas Micron's c200 1TB microSDXC card is rated to read data at 100MB/s. Rated write speeds are similar between the two at 90MB/s for Western Digital/SanDisk and 95MB/s...
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Western Digital is one of the world’s largest storage manufacturers with a wide array of products to meet their customer's unique needs. Its My Passport Wireless line of external drives offer more than just convenient storage. With on-board Wi-Fi, battery, and SD card readers, WD bills them as a working photographer’s best friend. That certainly sounds like a common use case for a device like this, but will this latest WD My Passport live up to its promise? WD sent over their latest My Passport Wireless SSD for us to use and review. The SSD version is available in capacities from 250GB to a spacious 2TB. They range in price from $199.99 to $749.99 respectively. Our unit is the...
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Western Digital is back with a new second-generation WD Black Gaming SSD, and it is promising some high-end NVMe PCIe performance for gamers at price points that won't break the bank. As with the previous generation, the new WD Black SN750 is a completely in-house design using Western Digital's 64-bit TLC 3D NAND, firmware and SSD controller. The WD Black SN750 family is available in 4 storage capacities: 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB. Although it doesn't sit at the top of the family, the 1TB model is actually the fastest SKU across the board. It makes uses of 256Gb NAND dies versus 512Gb for the 2TB SKU (so that it can remain a single-sided design). The differences between the two in performance...
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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 firmware tuned for enthusiast desktop applications. The drive’s main features and specifications...
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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 design. Power for the drive is provided through the Thunderbolt 3 connection, so you don't...
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