Tag: western-digital

WD is developing 40TB hard drives powered by microwaves

Western Digital (WD) may have lost a bid to buy Toshiba’s flash memory technology, but is still hard at work on its bread-and-butter hard drives . The company has unveiled a breakthrough called microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) that will allow ever-higher disk capacities, up to 40TB by the year 2025. “Commercialization of MAMR technology will pave the way to higher recording densities and lower cost per terabyte hard disk drives, ” said VP of research John Rydning in a statement. If you’re wondering what microwaves have to do with hard drives, WD has a developed a new type of drive head called a “spin torque oscillator” that generates a microwave field. That allows data to be written to magnetic media at a lower magnetic field than with conventional disks, making it possible to pack more bits into the same space. “As a result, Western Digital’s MAMR technology is now ready for prime time, and provides a more cost-effective, more reliable solution, ” the company said in a technical brief , adding that “MAMR also has the capability to extend areal density gains up to 4 Terabits per square inch.” As with its current enterprise drives, WD’s MAMR drives will use helium instead of air to reduce internal turbulence. So how “ready for prime time” is it? Western Digital says MAMR-based drives for data centers will appear in the market starting in 2019, and it will produce 40TB 3.5-inch disks by 2025, with “continued expansion beyond that timeframe.” WD didn’t say what capacity early MAMR drives would pack, but it recently released its first 14TB drive via its HGST (formerly Hitachi) subsidiary, so we’d expect the MAMR variants to go beyond that. Mechanical hard disk don’t have nearly the speed or reliability of SSDs, but the cost per gigabyte is multiple times lower. That’s crucial for data centers and cloud storage firms, especially since data-hungry AI software is becoming more and more pervasive. Don’t expect to see MAMR drives in your local media backup (NAS) drives right away, but it should trickle down fairly soon, giving you enough storage for future 8K HDR videos . Source: Western Digital

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WD is developing 40TB hard drives powered by microwaves

WD’s My Book Duo storage box puts 20TB on your desktop

Western Digital has unveiled the 20TB My Book Duo, its highest-capacity storage system yet, and it’s a good example of the pluses and minuses of spinning hard disks compared to SSDs . The system works at either RAID 0, which offers the maximum speed but no backup protection, RAID 1, for full data protection but lower speeds and JBOD (just a bunch of disks). At RAID 0 levels, it offers decent 360 MB/s speeds, enough to do video editing and other disk-intensive chores. WD says it uses RAID-optimized WD RED drives, which spin at 5, 400 RPM, though it doesn’t specify how many. The box includes a USB 3.1 Type-C interface port and two USB 3.0 Type-A ports that can be used to connect flash drives and other accessories to your PC. They can also charge up your smartphone, letting the drive do double-duty as a USB hub (it comes with a USB-C to USB-C and USB-A cable in the box). The My Book Duo also supports 256-bit AES hardware encryption. The base 4TB model costs $280/£270, while the top end 20TB configuration will set you back $800/£620. As a point of comparison, Samsung just unveiled its portable T5 SSD that costs $800/£760, but you get one-tenth the storage — 2TB. However, you also get a lot more performance, with 540 MB/s from a single drive and the greater reliability of SSDs. In other words, price is the lone advantage left to mechanical disks and the reason why WD is so anxious to keep its relationship with flash storage manufacturer Toshiba.

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WD’s My Book Duo storage box puts 20TB on your desktop

WD’s next-gen SSDs add even more speed and capacity

Hard disk specialist Western Digital (WD) acquired SSD maker SanDisk last year for a colossal $19 billion, and now we’re getting some idea as to its strategy. The company unveiled two new lineups — branded under each company’s names — that feature the first SSDs to use 64-layer 3D NAND chips developed by SanDisk. The new, higher capacity chips will allow for “lower power consumption and higher performance, endurance and capacities, ” Western Digital wrote in its press release . The two lines, WD Blue and SanDisk Ultra 3D, are identical capacity-wise, use the same controllers and have identical performance specs — though WD Blue also offers a M.2 2280 device that SanDisk doesn’t. All of the 256GB drives, both in 2.5-inch and M.2 formats, start at a very reasonable $100. They also come in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB sizes, but WD hasn’t listed prices for those items yet. That information will be particularly interesting, since the drives require fewer chips than rival SSDs, which will hopefully drive down the prices. As for the performance, it’s pretty, pretty good. The larger capacity devices can read at 550 MB/s and write 560 MB/s, and the 256GB SSD is just a touch slower (550 MB/s and 525 MB/s). Perhaps more importantly, all products have a mean time to failure (MTTF) of 1.75 million hours. WD says that’s “industry-leading, ” but it falls behind some products, including Samsung’s (more expensive) 850 Pro , which sports a two million hour MTBF. WD gave a pretty good clue as to why it’s offering identical products under different labels. “Between our two strong brands in SanDisk and WD, and their respective loyal customer bases and distribution channels, these advanced SSDs will appeal to a very broad [range of consumers], ” said WD CEO Mike Cordano. In other words, WD has huge stores of goodwill in both brands, and it’s not willing to give that up to save some marketing costs. Source: Western Digital

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WD’s next-gen SSDs add even more speed and capacity

Western Digital finally offers a consumer SSD

Western Digital has enjoyed a long run supplying data drives for all markets, but had stubbornly resisted releasing solid-state ones for consumers. This was an odd position back in 2008 when the technology began entering the mainstream and it’s only become a more glaring omission in the interim. But today, WD is finally offering its first SATA SSDs for personal computers. While their new products for the consumer market have focused on cloud-based networked hard disks and traditional HDDs, they haven’t completely ignored solid state tech. Back in May, WD bought SanDisk for $19 billion, likely to get their considerable share of the SSD market. Their new storage drives, however, will come out under the Western Digital banner. Their WD Blue solid-state drives come in 250 GB, 500 GB and 1 TB sizes as a higher-performance line available globally to “select customers, ” according to their press release . The lower-powered WD Green SSDs, coming in 120 GB and 240 GB, will have a more limited release later this quarter in certain regions. Source: Western Digital

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Western Digital finally offers a consumer SSD

The World’s Thinnest 2TB Hard Drive Is a Mere 9.5mm Thick

Just a few months ago we were impressed with Western Digital for cramming an entire terabyte of storage into a mobile hard drive that was just seven millimeters thick. But now Seagate’s come along to steal WD’s thunder with the ultra-slim 2.5-inch Spinpoint M9T that manages to double that capacity to two-terabytes inside a drive that’s just 9.5 millimeters thick. Read more…        

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The World’s Thinnest 2TB Hard Drive Is a Mere 9.5mm Thick