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 My Cloud DL4100 Business NAS Review
Western Digital is a comparatively recent entrant to the fast-growing NAS market. Despite having had a Windows Storage Server-based product for business users for some time now, a custom...
27 by Ganesh T S on 3/4/2015Western Digital My Cloud NAS Updates Target Prosumers and Small Businesses
Western Digital is no stranger to the NAS market. Their Sentinel series units (based on Windows Storage Server) have targeted business users for quite some time now. The My...
1 by Ganesh T S on 2/26/2015Western Digital Shows Off a 128GB SSD + 4TB HDD 3.5" SATA Express Dual-Drive
Storage Visions kicked off today and on the show floor Western Digital was showcasing a prototype of its new 3.5" dual-drive. The drive consists of a 128GB SSD along...
18 by Kristian Vättö on 1/4/2015Western Digital to Acquire Skyera
Western Digital, or its enterprise arm HGST to be exact, has today announced that it will be acquiring all-flash array provider Skyera. The terms of the transaction have not...
6 by Kristian Vättö on 12/15/2014WD Red Pro Review: 4 TB Drives for NAS Systems Benchmarked
A couple of weeks back, Western Digital updated their NAS-specific drive lineup with 5 and 6 TB Red drives. In addition, 7200 RPM Red Pro models with 2 -...
62 by Ganesh T S on 8/8/20146 TB NAS Drives: WD Red, Seagate Enterprise Capacity and HGST Ultrastar He6 Face-Off
Western Digital launched the first NAS-specific 6 TB drive today. In expanding their Red portfolio, they have brought 6 TB drives suitable for 24x7 operation into the hands of...
84 by Ganesh T S on 7/21/2014Western Digital Updates Red NAS Drive Lineup with 6 TB and Pro Versions
Back in July 2012, Western Digital began the trend of hard drive manufacturers bringing out dedicated units for the burgeoning NAS market with the 3.5" Red hard drive lineup...
37 by Ganesh T S on 7/21/2014Western Digital My Book Duo DAS Review
Earlier this week, we took a look at LaCie's high end 2-bay RAID DAS, the 2big Thunderbolt 2. It integrated both USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt 2 as connectivity options...
27 by Ganesh T S on 7/12/2014Western Digital Launches My Book Duo 2-bay USB 3.0 DAS
Even as the consumer NAS market continues to experience rapid growth, it is impossible for consumers to have really fast access to data when the storage is bottlenecked by...
11 by Ganesh T S on 6/24/2014Western Digital My Cloud EX2 2-bay NAS Review
The market for 2-bay and 4-bay NAS units has been growing at a much faster rate compared to other configurations. This trend is only expected to accelerate over the...
20 by Ganesh T S on 3/4/2014Western Digital My Cloud EX4 and LenovoEMC ix4-300d Home NAS Units Review
The consumer Network Attached Storage (NAS) market has seen tremendous growth over the past few years. As the amount of digital media generated by the average household increases, the...
38 by Ganesh T S on 2/26/2014The WD Black2 Review: World's First 2.5" Dual-Drive
If you had asked me a few years ago, I would've said that hybrid drives will be the next big thing in the storage industry. A hybrid drive made...
100 by Kristian Vättö on 1/30/2014Western Digital Releases Black^2: 120GB SSD + 1TB HD Dual-Drive in 2.5" Form Factor
To date all the hybrid storage solutions we have seen have been rather limited. Seagate got the idea right with the Momentus XT but having only 8GB of NAND...
66 by Kristian Vättö on 11/25/2013Western Digital Updates My Cloud Lineup with 4-bay EX4
We had covered the launch of the Western Digital My Cloud platform last month. The unit available at launch was a single-bay version similar to the popular My Book...
8 by Ganesh T S on 11/12/2013Western Digital Sentinel Lineup Updated with Xeon-Based Ultra-Compact Servers
Western Digital's SMB / enterprise network storage lineup (the Sentinel series) has been based on the Microsoft Windows Storage Server platform. The most recent update to the Sentinel lineup...
10 by Ganesh T S on 10/10/2013Western Digital Launches My Cloud Consumer NAS Platform
The network attached storage market is growing by leaps and bounds. While the SMB (small and medium business) / enterprise market is driven by speed, IOPS and concurrent access...
27 by Ganesh T S on 10/2/2013Battle of the 4 TB NAS Drives: WD Red and Seagate NAS HDD Face-Off
The SMB / SOHO / consumer NAS market is expected to experience good growth over the next few years. With declining PC sales and increase in affordability of SSDs...
54 by Ganesh T S on 9/4/2013Western Digital Updates Red NAS Drive Lineup with 4 TB and 2.5" Versions
In July 2012, we saw Western Digital tackle the burgeoning NAS market with the 3.5" Red hard drive lineup. They specifically catered to units having 1-5 bays. The firmware...
29 by Ganesh T S on 9/3/2013The Joys of 802.11ac WiFi
We’ve had quite a few major wireless networking standards over the years, and while some have certainly been better than others, I have remained a strong adherent of wired...
139 by Jarred Walton on 7/8/2013Western Digital Acquires STEC
Western Digital just announced that they've entered into an agreement to acquire STEC for approximately $340 million in cash. Technically STEC will be acquired by HGST (Hitachi Global Storage...
7 by Kristian Vättö on 6/24/2013