On the occasion of the “What’s Next” event, Western Digital presented several extremely interesting innovations, both in terms of consumer and enterprise and business, as well as one new identity which best represents the company’s mission. Davide Villa and Fabrizio Keller, Director Business Development EMEA and Senior Product Marketing Manager EMEA respectively, showed us all the news that will debut on the market in the coming months, as well as plans for the future.
“All our actions come to life from the belief that human potential can be combined with digital innovation, creating multiple possibilities,” he said. David Goeckeler, CEO of Western Digital, on the occasion of the event. “Inspired by the multiple ways in which our customers use data and strengthened by our consolidated presence in the market, we respond exclusively to all the storage needs of our different customers, at any scale: from the smallest smart devices, to the largest. public clouds “.
Let’s start with the Announcements of the world consumer, dedicated to both gamers and more classic users. The company announced the new SN740 SSD, an affordable DARM-less drive, which will be available in capacities up to 2TB and capable of sequential speeds of up to 5150MB / s, consuming up to 45% less than the previous model. The new SN740 supports TCG-Opal encryption and, more interestingly, will also be available in size M.2-2230, so ideally it will also be compatible with Steam Deck.
In the gaming field, however, there are two novelties concerning the WD_Black family, which expands with SN850X and P40 Game Drive. The first is a classic NVMe with M.2 interface and support for the PCIe 4.0 standard, available in two variants (with and without heat sink) with capacities up to 4TB starting at $ 190, the second is an external SSD, also compatible with the new generation consoles, which will be sold at a starting price of 120 dollars (no information for the Italian market yet). The gaming world of WD is also enriched with new features software, with some important additions such as game mode 2.0 which includes the predictive loading, which intelligently understands when a game is about to load and does pre-caching to speed up the operation, adaptive power management and latency reduction, which ensures greater overall system responsiveness.
Moving on to the world professionallet’s see some brand new news SanDisk and mainly dedicated to content creators, such as photographers and film makers. The modular system SanDisk Professional PRO-Blade is designed for the needs of acquisition, transfer and storage of very high resolution content: this ecosystem is composed of an SSD, an enclosure that allows you to connect it to the PC and a desktop station with 4 slots, which allows you to insert wine to 16TB of storage . PRO-Blade products will be available to the public starting in June; the SSD will have prices equal to 220.99 euros for the 1TB version, 372.99 euros for the 2TB version and 721.99 euros for the 4TB one, while the PRO-Blade Transport enclosure will cost 80.99 euros and will be also available in bundle with the SSD (at a reduced price). PRO-Blade Station will arrive on the American market by the end of the year at prices yet to be declared and there is no information on availability in Italy.
The juiciest news, however, are linked to the world enterprise and datacenter, for which WD has unveiled new Hard Disks and SSDs. As for the Hard Disks, during the event the company showed the new one 22TB Ultrastar DC HC570, that takes advantage of technology OptiNAND to ensure better capacity (metadata is saved in flash memory), better reliability (data in the cache is less likely to be lost in the event of a power failure, as flash memory is extremely fast) and higher performance, since it is It is possible to have the performance of a “write cache on” scenario while operating in a “write cache off” situation. HC570 is currently being tested with some selected customers, but during the summer it should officially arrive on the market, even in the Red, Gold and Purple versions.
Another very important innovation concerns technology UltraSMR, introduced with the new 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670. The UltraSMR technology, currently available only for datacenters, since it requires Kernel functionality that for now are only present in Linux environment, uses a writing technique that allows overlapping traces, so as to reach capacities up to 2.6TB per platter . In addition to this, Western Digital is working on technology for the future ePMR which should allow you to have Hard Disks with a capacity greater than 30 TB.
Last, but definitely not least, the new SSD Ultrastar DC SN650, which will arrive with nominal capacities of 8TB and 16TB (15.36TB, to be precise) in the 2.5 and E.1L formats and with support for the PCIe 4.0 standard, so as to further improve the performance of the increasingly fundamental cloud data centers. Still in the SSD area, WD announced a partnership with Samsung for Ultrastar DC ZN540, a product that relies on the Storage Zone, that adopts a different way of writing data and allows to reduce costs and increase capacity and performance by providing greater control to the user; Due to this, however, SSDs such as the Ultrastar DC ZN540 are unlikely to arrive on the consumer market, since the typical skills of IT managers who manage large data centers are required.
In addition to many new products, Western Digital also showed the new brand identity, featuring a new logo (which you can see below) and the new slogan Create what’s next. The new identity better communicates the corporate mission, which is to unleash the potential of data, making all their value available.
