Western Digital has it for everyone: news for consumer, pro and enterprise users

Western Digital has it for everyone

On the occasion of the "What's Next" event, Western Digital presented several extremely interesting innovations, both in terms of the consumer, enterprise and business spheres, as well as a new identity that best represents the company's Mission. Davide Villa and Fabrizio Keller, respectively Director Business Development EMEA and Senior Product Marketing Manager EMEA, 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 they come to life from the belief that human potential can be combined with digital innovation, creating multiple possibilities, ”said David Goeckeler, CEO of Western Digital, at 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 news from the consumer world, 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 M.2-2230 format, so ideally it will also be compatible with Steam Deck.

In the gaming field, on the other hand, 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 software, with some important additions such as game mode 2.0 which includes predictive loading, which intelligently understands when a game is about to load and pre-caching to speed up the operation. adaptive power management and latency reduction, which ensures greater overall system responsiveness.


Moving on to the professional world, we see some SanDisk news and mainly dedicated to content creators, such as photographers and film makers. The SanDisk Professional PRO-Blade modular system is designed for the needs of capturing, transferring and storing high-resolution content: this ecosystem consists 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.




Another very important novelty concerns the UltraSMR technology, 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, for the future Western Digital is working on ePMR technology, which should allow for Hard Disks with a capacity greater than 30 TB.




In addition to many new products, Western Digital also showed the new brand identity, characterized by 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.