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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Western Digital is expanding its vision for personal storage from beyond traditional internal and external hard drives, and it has something to do with cloud storage and a platform called “My Cloud”. Cloud storage is all the rage, and the convenience of having your files backed up offsite is undeniable, but there’s always a concern about security, and sometimes file availability--though mostly rather immediate with a service such as Dropbox--can be a bit clunky. It’s also expensive. The WD My Cloud platform removes the problem of worrying about vendor security and lock-in by giving you what boils down to your own file server that makes all your data available to you anytime...
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You have to appreciate a good external hard drive that faithfully ferries important data from one place to another, while safely stashed on a drive that’s wrapped inside a slick-looking, durable chassis. These days, the storage capacity on a typical and relatively inexpensive external hard drive is large; 1TB is a standard size, and it isn’t at all uncommon to see 2TB drives, too. We looked at a few external hard drives from Toshiba, WD, and LaCie, all with similar specs to see how they stacked up against one another. All three of the units in our test bank employ a speedy USB 3.0 interface with capacities that range from 750GB to 1TB in size and, as it happens, all three are compact...
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You have to appreciate a good external hard drive that faithfully ferries important data from one place to another, while safely stashed on a drive that’s wrapped inside a slick-looking, durable chassis. These days, the storage capacity on a typical and relatively inexpensive external hard drive is large; 1TB is a standard size, and it isn’t at all uncommon to see 2TB drives, too. We looked at a few external hard drives with similar specs from some major manufacturers to see how they stack up against one another. All three of the units in our test bank employ the speedy USB 3.0 interface, which is a standard option for many drives, and of course they’re all backwards compatible...
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Roughly a year ago, Western Digital launched its 3.5-inch WD Red NAS hard drives in 1TB, 2TB, and 3TB capacities, and now the company has added to the Red family with a 4TB 3.5-inch drive as well as a couple of 2.5-inch options. The 2.5-inch WD Red NAS drives, like the 3.5-inch versions, are also purpose-built for SOHO NAS storage with 1 to 5 bays. The SATA 6Gbps drives feature IntelliPower rotational speed and come in capacities of 1TB and 750GB. Why the 2.5-inch versions? “This small form factor enables our customers to use high capacity NAS hard drives that offer performance, quiet operation, and low power consumption in a more compact NAS enclosure,” wrote WD in a press release....
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HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital) claims that its latest mobile hard drive, the Travelstar 5K1500, offers the--and we quote--“highest storage density of any hard disk drive today”. Those are strong words, but HGST may have something there. They crammed 1.5TB into a 2.5-inch, 9.5mm chassis that houses three platters. The drives also feature 32MB cache and a 6Gbps SATA interface with 5400 RPM speed. At idle, the Travelstar 5K1500 consumes just 0.5W of power and emits 2.5 bels, making it both power efficient and very quiet--both of which are features that mobile system makers cherish. Further, to protect against the...
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Western Digital has a new line of portable hard drives on the market, the My Passport Ultra, which adds to the family of My Passport devices and serves as a generational bump for the My Passport Edge. In fact, the Ultra looks exactly like the Edge (and comes in black, silver, red, or blue), but it comes in a greater variety of capacities--500GB, 1TB, and 2TB. The drives feature USB 3.0, WD Smartware Pro backup software (which includes Dropbox integration), and password protection and hardware encryption for added security. The 500GB version will run you $99.99 while the 1TB version is $129.99; there’s no price yet on the 2TB My Passport Ultra, but it won’t be available until Q3 anyway....
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Western Digital and SanDisk Put Their Heads Together, Come Up With Ultra-Thin 2.5-inch WD Black SSHD
Western Digital and SanDisk are teaming up to produce a 2.5-inch SSHD that essentially puts a SanDisk iSSD with a WD Black SSHD. Perhaps its obvious that two companies could bring their respective expertise to the same table to develop a single product with the best of both, but this sort of thing doesn’t happen every day. WD obviously brings its wealth of experience in the storage market as well as its SSHD and SATA IO technology, and SanDisks’ contribution is designed to deliver lower power consumption, reduced cost, better reliability, and it should also facilitate a smaller form factor. Indeed, the WD Black SSHD is a scant 5mm thick, and it offers 500GB of storage for the industry’s...
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As ultraportable devices of various stripes proliferate, there's a corresponding need for extra-slim storage drives that still deliver in terms of performance and storage capacity. Western Digital has a pair of new products to address those needs with the WD Blue HDD and WD Black SSHD drives. Both of the 2.5-inch drives are just 5mm thick to give OEMs a solution that occupies as small a space as possible, leaving room for extra schock absorption and overall thinner computer chassis. WD says that thinner devices mean that the drives are more susceptible to damage, so they included "best-in-class" technology to reduce shock and noise, as well as StableTrac and dual-stage atcuators. The drives connect...
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