Items tagged with Western-Digital
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 shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology. In addition, Western Digital says that the storage...
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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 recording drive, the Ultrastar Hs14. Brendan Collins, vice president of marketing, Devices, Western...
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Toshiba has just announced that they will begin shipping samples of its 512 Gigabit, three-bits-per-cell, 64-layer 3D NAND (BiCS 3D). Mass production is expected to take place during the second half of 2017. Western Digital and Toshiba engineers have used digital stacking for their sixty-four layers in order to achieve a much larger storage density for its NAND in a smaller footprint. This technology also enables 1TB chip solutions. The flash memory stacked cell structure is best for applications that require high capacity and performance. According to Toshiba, “realizes a 65 percent larger capacity per unit chip size than the company’s 48-layer, 256Gb (32 gigabyte) device. This increases...
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External storage is commonplace now, but traditional standalone storage products sometimes leave a large number of devices hanging. I've got a 2TB external drive plugged into a USB 3 port, for example, which is great for the main PC, but it doesn't help much with the laptop, iPhone and iPad. That's where some of the latest wireless storage products like the WD My Passport Wireless Pro we're going to be showing you here come in. Through creative piggy-backing onto your Wi-Fi network, you can add multiple terabytes of additional storage that can be accessed by any wirelessly-connected device, giving your phone, tablet, laptop and anything else shared access through a high-speed wireless interface....
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Once you’ve tasted the sweet performance goodness offered by solid state drives (SSDs), it’s hard to go back to traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) for your data needs. Western Digital is hoping to go after mainstream customers that are looking for a quick and easy speed boost with its new WD Blue and WD Green SSDs. The WD Blue series is available in both 2.5-inch and M.2 2280 form-factors in 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB capacities. Western Digital says that the drives — which are targeted at both desktop and notebook users — offer sequential read and write speeds of 545 MB/sec and 525 MB/sec respectively and offer an endurance rating of 400 terabytes written (TBW). The 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB offerings...
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Western Digital is stepping up its efforts in the prosumer NAS market with the introduction of the My Cloud EX2 Ultra series. The My Cloud EX2 Ultra is designed for prosumers and creative professionals alike, and offers an easy way to backup data, sync files across multiple computers and share files with others. Western Digital has empowered the My Cloud EX2 Ultra with a Marvell ARMADA 385 1.3GHz dual-core processor that is paired with 1GB of DDR3 memory. This should help the My Cloud EX2 Ultra in multitasking operations and gives it enough grunt to serve as a Plex Media Server (I just wouldn’t call on it to handle transcoding operations). RAID 0, RAID 1, JBOD and spanning modes are supported...
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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, and very useful if you're the type of person who is constantly passing your external drive around to...
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The hard drive market has become a lot less sexy in the past few years thanks to SSDs. What we used to consider "fast" for a hard drive is relatively slow compared to even the cheapest of today's solid state drives. But there are two areas where hard drives still rule the roost, and that's in terms of overall capacity and cost per gigabyte. Right now you can buy a 4TB hard drive for the same cost as a 256GB SSD, so the two are in separate universes in that regard. We love SSDs and think just about everyone should run their OS on one, but most aren't large enough to hold all user data over a long period of time, so we still need hard drives for bulk storage duties, and will continue to need them...
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Western Digital’s original My Cloud personal cloud storage solution brought a unique approach to the NAS segment, for individuals and the SOHO crowd, and the subsequent multi-bay My Cloud EX4 offered a beastly amount of storage--8TB, 12TB, or 16TB--via the same “My Cloud” platform. WD introduced the My Cloud EX2 as something of a ‘tweener' solution, bringing a two-bay option that isn’t as hard on the wallet as the EX4 yet offers a copious amount of storage capacity and more powerful features such as RAID... WD My Cloud EX2 Personal Cloud Server Review...
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Western Digital’s original My Cloud personal cloud storage solution brought a unique approach to the NAS segment, for individuals and the SOHO crowd, and the subsequent multi-bay My Cloud EX4 offered a beastly amount of storage--8TB, 12TB, or 16TB--via the same “My Cloud” platform. WD introduced the My Cloud EX2 as something of a ‘tweener' solution, bringing a two-bay option that isn’t as hard on the wallet as the EX4 yet offers a copious amount of storage capacity and more powerful features such as RAID. Even with a few more choice features on board, the My Cloud EX2 is designed to be as simple to set up and manage as the original single-bay My Cloud....
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There’s a new member of WD’s My Cloud family, and it’s designed to fill the niche between the consumer-level My Cloud personal cloud storage device we reviewed a few months ago and the more professional-leaning My Cloud EX4 (with up to 16TB of storage capacity). The My Cloud EX2 lands somewhere in the middle and offers up to 8TB of storage. WD sells the device with an empty chassis or loaded up with WD Red drives. If 4TB, 6TB,or 8TB somehow isn’t enough for you, you can connect additional storage via the USB 3.0 port on the back. WD My Cloud EX2 What WD offers with the My Cloud platform generally and the EX2 specifically is a personal, private cloud. The device runs NASware...
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Cloud storage has emerged as a hugely attractive option for consumers and businesses alike. Consumer cloud storage darling Dropbox has gotten big enough that it warrants its own developer conference, Box is consistently innovating in the business space, Amazon’s storage cloud is massive and popular, and we could go on and on with numerous other companies offering all types of cloud storage services. Even as cloud storage has exploded, however, there are many skeptics who believe that entrusting your data to a cloud service is foolish, due to reliability, privacy and security concerns. Diehard proponents of local storage have legitimate concerns when they say they’re distrustful of...
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Cloud storage has emerged as a hugely attractive option for consumers and businesses alike. Consumer cloud storage darling Dropbox has gotten big enough that it warrants its own developer conference, Box is consistently innovating in the business space, Amazon’s storage cloud is massive and popular, and we could go on and on with numerous other companies offering all types of cloud storage services. Even as cloud storage has exploded, however, there are many skeptics who believe that entrusting your data to a cloud service is foolish. For one thing, you’re giving your precious data (be it family photos or company trade secrets) to a third party, and beyond that...
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In the data center, every little bit that saves on cooling or power consumption helps, and to that end Western Digital’s HGST brand is shipping a new hard drive that’s designed for higher-capacity storage, higher storage density, lower power consumption, and lower cooling requirements. The HGST 6TB Ultrastar He6 features the company’s 7Stac disk design, claiming 50% higher capacity in a standard 3.5-inch form factor over competitive 5-platter, 4TB drives. As we first wrote about last year, though, the premier feature of the new HGST platform is that it’s filled with helium (helium!). The Ultrastar He6 is hermetically sealed with HGST’s HelioSeal process and filled...
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