Western Digital

5-Bit PLC SSDs Not Coming Until 2025, or Later: Western Digital

Home News (Image credit: Western Digital) Both Intel and Toshiba have become increasingly confident in their projections for the debut of PLC flash, which packs in five bits per cell to reduce SSD pricing, but Western Digitial recently downplayed the feasibility of PLC SSDs before 2025. WD says this type of memory will only become viable… Read more

Chia Demand Prompts WD, Seagate to Ramp Up HDD Production

Home News (Image credit: Toshiba) Demand for hard drives skyrocketed recently because of Chia cryptocurrency farming, causing major HDD shortages and sending retail prices to record highs. In a bid to meet the demand for hard drives, Seagate and Western Digital are ramping up production of their high-capacity HDDs by essentially cranking up their existing production… Read more

Samsung Unveils ZNS SSD: QLC V-NAND for Datacenter-Grade Endurance & Performance

Home News (Image credit: Samsung) Samsung has introduced its first Zones Namespaces (ZNS) solid-state drives that combine high performance, long endurance, relatively low price enabled by the company’s QLC V-NAND, and improved quality of service (QoS) for datacenters. To use Samsung’s new PM1731a ZNS SSDs, datacenters will have to deploy new storage systems and software. ZNS SSDs work… Read more

Marvell’s New PCIe 5.0 SSD Controllers Have 14 TB/s of Throughput

Home News (Image credit: Marvell) Marvell has introduced the industry’s first SSD controllers for NVMe 1.4b-compliant drives that will feature a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface. The Bravera SC5 controllers are designed primarily for bandwidth and performance-hungry servers used in cloud data centers. They will provide up to 14 TB/s throughput as well as up to… Read more

SanDisk’s new card reader dock is all I could ever want and more

Western Digital, owner of the SanDisk brand, has announced a new product called the Pro-Dock 4, and it’s all I’ve ever wanted in a card reading solution: it lets you mix and match four card reading modules, which can all be read simultaneously, and connect them all to your computer using a single Thunderbolt 3… Read more

Western Digital’s Latest WD_Black SSDs Target Consoles, Affordable PCIe 4.0

Home News (Image credit: WD) While in-person Computex has been canceled, companies still have new product to roll out, and today Western Digital adds a trio of new drives to its gaming-focused WD_Black line. There are a pair of D30 Game Drives targeting next-gen consoles, with one model aiming for the PlayStation 5 market, and… Read more

SSDs Outsell HDDs in Unit Sales 3:2: 99 Million Vs. 64 Million in Q1

Home News (Image credit: Micron) Solid-state drives have a number of advantages when compared to hard drives, which include performance, dimensions, and reliability. Yet, for quite a while, HDDs offered a better balance between capacity, performance, and cost, which is why they outsold SSDs in terms of unit sales. Things have certainly changed for client… Read more

Seagate Lists the Mach.2: The World’s Fastest HDD

Home News (Image credit: Seagate) Seagate has finally listed its dual-actuator hard disk drive — the Mach.2 Exos 2X14 — on its website and disclosed the official specs. With a 524MB/s sustained transfer rate, the Mach.2 is the fastest HDD ever, its sequential read and write performance is twice that of a normal drive. In… Read more

Chia Coin Won’t Drive Up Most HDD Prices, Analysts Claim

Home News (Image credit: Toshiba) Financial analysts believe that while hard disk drive pricing has spiked in recent weeks due to Chia coin mining and will continue to be higher than usual for a while, average HDD prices will not get considerably higher than they are today as there is extraordinary demand for specific models… Read more

US Senator Wants to Know How Huawei Still Has Hard Drives

Home News (Image credit: Seagate) A senior U.S. senator on Tuesday filed a formal enquiry with three makers of hard drives — Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital — asking whether they complied with a regulation that requires them to obtain a license to sell HDDs to Huawei. Republican senator Roger Wicker this week decided to… Read more

Big HDDs Set New Sales Record: 288 Exabytes in Q1

Home News (Image credit: Toshiba) Unit shipments of hard drives in the first quarter of 2021 were down both sequentially and year-over-year as consumer devices continued their migration to SSDs. Still, HDD capacity sold during the quarter set a new record of 288 exabytes as hyperscalers and enterprises upgraded their storage capabilities. Seagate remained the… Read more

Chia Currency Has Already Used 1 Exabyte of Storage

Home News (Image credit: Western Digital) Just when we thought that smart cities, smart factories, IoT devices, autonomous vehicles, and robots will be the main generators of data that will require storage space in the coming years, Chia cryptocurrency just demonstrated that it will also be a formidable generator of data, at least for the time being. In a about a month’s… Read more

Raspberry Pi Gets 5.25-inch Floppy Drive Support

Home News (Image credit: Dr. Scott M. Baker) Long gone are the days of limiting your Raspberry Pi with large-capacity microSD cards and SSDs. Thanks to Dr. Scott Baker’s latest project, makers are finally free to use 360K floppy disks for all their legacy storage needs! The best Raspberry Pi projects are made from scratch… Read more

Intel’s 11th Gen Core i9 processor boosts Microsoft Flight Simulator by 20 percent

If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. I built a new gaming PC in September to play new games like Microsoft Flight Simulator, Cyberpunk 2077, and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. I figured that picking Intel’s Core i9-10900K and Nvidia’s RTX 3090 would make this machine… Read more

Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 NVMe Boot Enters Beta

Home News (Image credit: Jeff Geerling) How do you boot your Raspberry Pi? The vast majority of us will use a microSD card, some may use a USB drive as a boot device. With the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 we saw a PCIe 1x slot appear on the official carrier board and intrepid hackers… Read more