Western Digital

When Western Digital introduced its Ultrastar DC SN861 SSDs earlier this year, the company did not disclose which controller it used for these drives, which made many observers presume that WD was using an in-house controller. But a recent teardown of the drive shows that is not the case; instead, the company is using a controller from Fadu, a South Korean company founded in 2015 that specializes on enterprise-grade turnkey SSD solutions. The Western Digital Ultrastar DC SN861 SSD is aimed at performance-hungry hyperscale datacenters and enterprise customers which are adopting PCIe Gen5 storage devices these days. And, as uncovered in photos from a recent Storage Review article, the drive is based on Fadu's FC5161 NVMe 2.0-compliant controller. The FC5161 utilizes 16 NAND channels supporting...

Western Digital Shows Off Prototype 1TB SDXC Card at Photokina 2016

In recent years we have seen the development of 3D NAND push up the capacity and push down the prices of all sorts of flash devices, from SSDs to...

25 by Ryan Smith on 9/20/2016

Western Digital to Use 3D ReRAM as Storage Class Memory for Special-Purpose SSDs

At the Flash Memory Summit this week, Western Digital announced that it intends to use 3D Resistive RAM (ReRAM) as storage class memory (SCM) for its future special-purpose ultra-fast...

38 by Anton Shilov on 8/12/2016

Western Digital Adds Helium-Filled WD Gold 10 TB HDD to Lineup

Western Digital has this week introduced its new 10TB datacenter-class helium-filled WD Gold hard drive. This drive, according to WD, boasts higher performance compared to its predecessor combined with...

34 by Anton Shilov on 8/4/2016

G-Technology Introduces G-Drive and G-RAID External HDDs up to 20 TB

G-Technology this week introduced several new models of its G-Drive and G-RAID products with Thunderbolt 1, USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt 2 soltions. These are direct attached storage (DAS) devices...

16 by Anton Shilov on 7/22/2016

Western Digital Expands My Passport External USB 3.0 Drives To 4 TB

Western Digital last week introduced several new members to its My Passport family of external hard drives. The new portable external HDDs can store up to 4 TB of...

18 by Anton Shilov on 7/6/2016

Western Digital My Passport Wireless Pro Wi-Fi Hard Drive Review

Wireless storage peripherals have traditionally targeted users of mobile devices (where internal storage space is at a premium). As multimedia capture devices (both consumer and professional) become more connected...

25 by Ganesh T S on 6/21/2016

Western Digital’s Acquisition of SanDisk Officially Closes

Western Digital announced on Tuesday that the Chinese authorities have approved its acquisition of SanDisk. The regulatory approval from China's Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) in connection with the planned...

18 by Anton Shilov on 5/16/2016

Market Views: HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low

Leading industry watchers like IDC and Gartner early this year predicted that the first quarter of 2016 would not be good for the PC industry and various companies agreed...

116 by Anton Shilov on 5/12/2016

Western Digital Introduces WD Gold HDDs for Datacenters

Western Digital has announced a new family of hard drives specifically for data centers. The new WD Gold HDDs will feature multiple technologies that the company uses to build...

30 by Anton Shilov on 4/19/2016

Best NASes: Q1 2016

Network-attached storage vendors do not usually follow a regular yearly cadence in updating their offerings. Releases for different market segments are spread throughout the year. That said, thanks to...

26 by Ganesh T S on 3/30/2016

Market Views: Hard Drive Shipments Drop by Nearly 17% in 2015

Today we're launching a new feature on the AnandTech Pipeline: Quarterly HDD shipments reports. Here we'll examine HDD sales and analyze what's behind them. Since some numbers are estimates...

37 by Anton Shilov on 3/2/2016

Western Digital Introduces Its First Helium-Filled HDDs for Consumer Applications

Helium-filled hard drives have a number of mechanical advantages compared to traditional HDDs, but they are also more expensive to manufacture. Western Digital subsidiary HGST introduced the world’s first...

34 by Anton Shilov on 3/1/2016

Hard Disk Drives with HAMR Technology Set to Arrive in 2018

While many client devices use solid-state storage technologies nowadays, hard disk drives (HDDs) are still used by hundreds of millions of people and across virtually all datacenters worldwide. Heat-assisted...

72 by Anton Shilov on 12/24/2015

Seagate: Hard Disk Drives Set to Stay Relevant for 20 Years

The very first hard disk drives (HDDs) were demonstrated by IBM back in 1956 and by the early 1980s they became the dominant storage technology for all types of...

86 by Anton Shilov on 12/18/2015

Western Digital Expands HGST Helium Drive Lineup with 10TB Ultrastar He10

HGST, a Western Digital subsidiary, has been shipping hard drives sealed with helium for a couple of years now. Their helium drives have so far come in two flavors...

113 by Ganesh T S on 12/2/2015

Western Digital To Acquire SanDisk

Western Digital announced today that they have entered in to an agreement to acquire SanDisk for approximately $19 billion. Western Digital is one of the few remaining hard drive...

35 by Billy Tallis on 10/21/2015

Western Digital My Cloud Mirror Gen 2 Review

Western Digital is well known to the average consumer as a hard drive manufacturer. By extension, it also opens up the network-attached storage (NAS) market to them. In 2014...

20 by Ganesh T S on 10/9/2015

WD Red Pro 6 TB Review - High Performance NAS HDD Gets a Capacity Bump

Despite the increasing affordability of SSDs, hard drives continue to remain the storage medium of choice for applications where capacity and cost factors outweigh performance requirements. Specialty drives have...

62 by Ganesh T S on 9/7/2015

Western Digital Updates My Cloud Mirror NAS, Releases My Cloud OS 3

Western Digital markets their NAS lineup under the 'Personal Cloud' category. This is further sub-divided into three markets, the 'Consumer Series' (the MyCloud units), 'Expert Series' (the EX units...

6 by Ganesh T S on 9/1/2015

Western Digital Updates WD Red Pro and WD Black with 5 & 6TB Models

It is that time of the year when Western Digital updates their Red lineup. Launched in 2012, the WD Red drives target network attached storage units with an optimized...

51 by Ganesh T S on 8/18/2015

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