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: Sales of Helium-Filled HDDs Accelerating, 15M Sold So Far
Western Digital recently announced that it had sold 15 million helium-filled hard drives, indicating that sales of such HDDs are accelerating. Since the launch of the HGST HelioSeal platform...
29 by Anton Shilov on 5/13/2017Western Digital Starts Shipments of HGST Ultrastar He12 12 TB HDDs
Western Digital on Wednesday announced that it had begun to ship its HGST Ultrastar He12 hard drives with 12 TB of capacity. The HDDs are the first drives to...
15 by Anton Shilov on 4/28/2017Micron Hires New CEO: Sanjay Mehrotra, SanDisk Co-Founder And Former CEO
In February, Micron CEO Mark Durcan announced his retirement after three decades with the company. Durcan had previously announced plans to retire in 2012 while serving as the company's...
1 by Billy Tallis on 4/27/2017Western Digital Expands Purple Lineup with a 10 TB Helium-Filled HDD
Western Digital has expanded its Purple lineup of hard drives, aimed at video surveillance applications, with a 10 TB helium-filled HDD. The drive is optimized for write-intensive workloads and...
8 by Anton Shilov on 4/13/2017Western Digital Announces My Passport SSD: Up to 1 TB, AES-256, USB-C
Western Digital has announced its first external SSDs to be sold under the WD brand. The My Passport SSDs are shock resistant, support hardware-based AES-256 encryption, use USB 3.1...
8 by Anton Shilov on 4/11/2017The Western Digital Black PCIe SSD (512GB) Review
After acquiring SanDisk and introducing WD Green and WD Blue SSDs, it is no surprise to see Western Digital introduce a WD Black SSD that is a M.2 PCIe...
36 by Billy Tallis on 3/8/2017Toshiba Samples 64-Layer 512 Gb BiCS 3D NAND, Announces 1 TB BGA SSD
Toshiba on Wednesday said that it had begun to sample its latest BiCS 3D NAND flash memory chips with 64 word layers and 512 Gb capacity. A co-development project...
8 by Anton Shilov on 2/23/2017Western Digital Announces SanDisk Skyhawk Enterprise NVMe SSDs
Today Western Digital announced the first enterprise NVMe SSDs under their SanDisk brand. The new SanDisk Skyhawk series are 2.5" U.2 SSDs intended for datacenter use. While Western Digital's...
17 by Billy Tallis on 2/7/2017Toshiba Announces Plan to Sell Minority Stake In NAND Flash Production Business
This morning Toshiba has announced that they will be spinning off their chip production business as part of a broader plan to sell off a minority stake in the...
1 by Ryan Smith & Anton Shilov on 1/27/2017Toshiba Is Studying The Possibility of Spinning Off NAND Flash Production
Toshiba on Wednesday confirmed that it is studying the possibility of splitting its NAND flash business into a separate company. While nothing has been decided as this point, the...
11 by Anton Shilov on 1/19/2017Western Digital Announces WD Black PCIe SSD
Western Digital has announced the WD Black PCIe SSD, their first PCIe SSD for the consumer market. While the WD Green and WD Blue SSDs introduced last fall were...
19 by Billy Tallis on 1/4/2017Commercial NAS Operating Systems - Exploring Value-Additions - Part I
A comprehensive overview of how various commercial off-the-shelf NAS operating systems address the core requirements was posted last month. From the perspective of addressed features, the core requirements are...
31 by Ganesh T S on 12/22/2016Western Digital Announces Ultrastar He12 12 TB and 14 TB HDDs
Western Digital on Tuesday introduced its fourth-generation enterprise-class hard drives filled with helium. The HGST Ultrastar He12 HDD can store up to 12 TB of data, whereas its version...
26 by Anton Shilov on 12/9/2016HGST Ultrastar SS200 SSD: Up to 7.68 TB, 1.8 GB/s, Dual-Port SAS 12 Gbps
Western Digital has introduced a new family of Ultrastar SS200 SAS SSDs that wed high-performance with capacities up to 7.68 TB as well as relatively high endurance. The drives...
6 by Anton Shilov on 12/7/2016HGST Ultrastar SN200 Accelerator: 7.68 TB Capacity, 6.1 GB/s Read Speed, 1.2M IOPS
Western Digital this week announced two high-end HGST Ultrastar families of SSDs designed for high-frequency workloads in cloud and hyperscale environments that require instant response time. The new drives...
13 by Anton Shilov on 12/7/2016Commercial NAS Operating Systems - A Comprehensive Overview of Core Features
The market for network-attached storage units has expanded significantly over the last few years. The rapid growth in public cloud storage (Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive and the like) has...
103 by Ganesh T S on 11/14/2016Western Digital My Book 8TB and My Passport 4TB External HDDs Review
Western Digital has a number of direct-attached storage (DAS) products based on hard drives. They cater to different market segments. These DAS units usually employ a USB port to...
35 by Ganesh T S on 10/16/2016Western Digital Introduces WD Blue And WD Green SSDs
Five months ago, Western Digital completed its acquisition of SSD and NAND flash manufacturer SanDisk, adding consumer SSDs and more enterprise SSDs to their existing portfolio of hard drives...
13 by Billy Tallis on 10/11/2016The Western Digital Blue (1TB) SSD Review: WD Returns to SSDs
After completing the acquisition of SanDisk, Western Digital is entering the consumer SSD market under its own brand with new SSDs derived from existing SanDisk product lines. As with...
77 by Billy Tallis on 10/11/2016Market Trends Q2 2016: SSD Shipments Up 41.2% YoY, PC Sales Up on Q1
Sales of SSDs in the first quarter of 2016 were up 41.2% year-over-year, based on findings from TrendFocus*, a storage market tracking company. Shipments of all types of SSDs...
24 by Anton Shilov on 10/5/2016