Tag Archives: Western Digital

Western Digital has quietly started to sell its new WD Blue solid-state hybrid drives with ‘self-learning’ NAND flash cache. The drives are designed to offer solid-state drive-like performance in select applications, but are not expected to be too expensive since they belong to WD’s mainstream family of products. Initially Western …

Seagate Technology, the world’s second largest maker of hard disk drives, on Monday slashed its forecast of hard disk drives sales in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2015. Seagate expects shipments of its HDDs to hit a five-year low, a bad news for the whole high-tech industry. Seagate …

Seagate Technology this week demonstrated a NAS packed with hard disk drives that use heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. While the company claims that the NAS worked flawlessly, Seagate again reconsidered the launch timeframe for its HAMR HDDs and delayed them to 2017 – 2018. Nonetheless, the company is already …

HGST, a maker of hard disk drives that belongs to Western Digital, on Tuesday formally introduced the world’s first hard disk drive with 10TB capacity. The HDD was developed for active archive applications and is not designed to offer leading-edge performance. Moreover, to use it, owners of datacenters will need …

Shipments of hard disk drives tanked significantly in the first quarter of the year due to sharp declines of sales of both PC and non-PC HDDs. Western Digital Corp. retained its position as the largest supplier of hard drives, Seagate Technology came second and Toshiba Corp. was the distant third. …

SanDisk is one of the leading producers of NAND flash-based devices, could be an excellent acquisition target for Seagate and Western Digital, according to a financial analyst. While at present the takeover of SanDisk is a hypothetical thing, HDD makers may be very interested in acquiring a company with NAND …

HGST, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., on Tuesday said that its Ultrastar HelioSeal hard disk drives are now field-proven and rated for two and a half million hours mean time between failure (MTBF). In addition, the company said that it had begun to sample its 10TB hard drives …

HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., has demonstrated its highly-anticipated 10TB hard disk drive at the Linux Foundation Vault trade-show in Boston, Massachusetts. The new drive is already in mass production and will be released commercially shortly. ZDNet has managed to picture the prototype of the 10TB SMR HelioSeal …

HGST, a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital, first announced its helium-filled hard disk drives in 2013 and started their shipments in 2014. Such drives have a number of advantages compared to traditional HDDs, but they still have not gained popularity because both WD and Seagate produce hard drives with …

Showa Denko K.K., an independent producer of platters for hard disk drives, has announced its first eighth-generation perpendicular magnetic recording platters for HDDs. The first eighth-gen media is aimed at hard drives in 2.5” form-factor and has 750GB capacity. Toshiba will use such platters for its latest 3TB 2.5” HDDs. The …

For years manufacturers of hard disk drives have been saying that SSDs were too expensive for mainstream PCs. However, at present chief executive officer of Western Digital Corp. has to admit that more and more personal computers utilize solid-state drives instead of HDDs. Moreover, this trend will strengthen this year …

Seagate Technology has issued a statement regarding consumer hard drive reliability report published by Backblaze. The company claims that the data published by the cloud-storage provider, which uses consumer-class HDDs and extensive replication mechanisms to store data for its clients, contradicts reliability reports by other customers. Moreover, Seagate notes that …

Backblaze, a cloud-storage provider that uses consumer-class hard disk drives and extensive replication mechanisms to store data for its customer, has published yet another HDD reliability report. Just like the previous issue, Backblaze found that that desktop hard drives from HGST, a division of Western Digital Corp., are generally more …

Western Digital Corp. still has not introduced a lineup of its own-brand solid-state drives for consumers, even though the company owns a lot of various SSD-related intellectual property and offers SSDs to corporate users. Nonetheless, the things may change this year as the company is working on solid-state storage devices …

Western Digital on Friday announced that it will demonstrate its first 4TB solid-state hybrid drive (SSHD) with Serial ATA Express interface at the Storage Visions 2015 conference. The new device will hit the market later this year and will be another attempt of WD to wed SSD-like performance with HDD-like capacity. …

Western Digital Corp. on Monday said that it has acquired Skyera, a developer of solid-state storage systems for scale-out cloud and enterprise data centers. The move will make WD more competitive on the market of enterprise-class solid-state storage solutions. Skyera will be fully integrated into HGST in order to augment …

At the recent Magnetism and Magnetic Materials (MMM) conference Advanced Storage Technology Consortium (ASTC), which unites numerous makers of hard disk drives as well as developers of storage solutions, demonstrated a new HDD roadmap. Apparently, rapid increases in areal density of hard drive media will allow HDD makers to create …

HGST began to ship its 8TB helium-filled hard disk drives to partners among makers of servers and storage equipment back in September. By now the new drives with unprecedented capacity have made it to retail, but their prices are so extreme that even computer enthusiasts will hardly buy them. HGST’s Ultrastar He8 …

At the Ceatec trade-show in Japan last week TDK demonstrated its new heads for hard disk drives that support the heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. Such heads could enable next generations of hard drives with rather extreme capacities already next year. Capacities of modern hard drives are – among other …

Showa Denko (SDK), an independent producer of platters for hard disk drives, has begun to manufacture its seventh-generation 1.10TB – 1.30TB platters for high-capacity hard drives. The move will allow Seagate Technology, as well as other makers of HDDs, to introduce storage devices with up to 9TB capacity. Showa Denko’s …

Failure rate of consumer-class hard disk drives is a point of concern for many, if not all computer enthusiasts who build PCs themselves. Apparently, failure rate of hard disk drives heavily depends on manufacturing processes of particular manufacturers. Last week a report from Backblaze, a cloud-storage provider that uses consumer-class …

Backblaze, a cloud-storage provider that uses consumer-class hard disk drives and extensive replication mechanisms to store data, has published a new hard drive reliability report. It is not a secret that many consumer-grade HDDs are not very reliable, but what is surprising and alarming is that failure rate of certain …

Although HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., introduced its 10TB hard disk drive earlier this month, the company has never revealed when it plans to release the product commercially. This week a representative for HGST finally said that the company will start mass production of behemoth HDD in early 2015. …

Western Digital this week introduced its new WD Ae hard disk drives for “cold” data storage applications that will come in 6TB-class capacities, which will vary. The company will supply such drives to select customers, who operate datacentres or build storage devices for them. The point of variable capacities, which …

HGST, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., has introduced three new Ultrastar-series hard disk drives with 6TB, 8TB and 10TB capacity designed for data centre storage infrastructure. The new HDDs utilize WD’s latest technologies – including HelioSeal, new platters featuring perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology as well as all-new …

Solid-state hybrid drives (SSHD) – hybrid storage solutions featuring NAND flash and rotating media – promise to offer the best of two worlds: performance of solid-state drives and capacities of hard disk drives. Unfortunately, in many cases SSHDs just compromise both performance and storage capacities. As a consequence, they are …

HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., on Monday unveiled its new enterprise-class solid-state drives with Serial Attached SCSI-12Gb/s interface. The new drives boast with up to 1.6TB capacity and up to 1.1GB/s read throughput, which puts them among the fastest and most reliable SSDs on the market today. The new family …

HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., this week introduced the industry’s first hard disk drive with 1.8TB capacity, 10K rpm spindle speed and SAS-12Gb/s interface. The drive will be used in mission-critical applications that do not require maximum possible performance offered by solid-state storage solutions, but take advantage of …

The market of solid-state drives is probably one of the fastest growing IT markets nowadays and the competition is pretty tough. While the war on the SSD market will probably oust many companies, including significant ones, several leaders of the market are already clear and they will likely continue to …

At present there are loads of various digital devices around, since every single one of them can fail, the chances to lose  precious data are pretty high in general. However, according to a recent global survey by Kroll Ontrack, the leading provider of data recovery and discovery products and services, …