Western Digital

Western Digital is a common name in the world of computer storage, making many of the hard drives inside computers and other devices today. The company has announced a new architecture called OptiNAND that meshes traditional hard drives with flash storage capability to deliver performance and increased areal density. OptiNAND drives are essentially a combination of a traditional hard drive with an iNAND embedded flash drive.

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Very few things in modern computing probably scare people more than the thought of losing years of data in a blink of an eye. That nightmare, unfortunately, became a reality for thousands of owners of Western Digital's discontinued My Book Live storage last week. Years' worth of files, photos, videos, and everything in between were remotely erased because of some malicious actors that may have been competing with each other. What makes matters worse is that Western Digital itself may have had a hand in actually enabling one of two vulnerabilities that made this remote mass-wipe possible.

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Owners of some Western Digital external hard drives should disconnect them from the internet and probably turn them off completely, as reports of remotely wiped data continue. The drive-maker confirmed last week that some owners had seen their network-connected storage accessed unofficially and a complete reset triggered, though details on just how much people should be concerned continue to emerge.

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Nothing is scarier than the idea of losing years' worth of data in a blink of an eye, whether through the loss of physical storage or, in this case, the deletion of said data. Owners of Western Digital's old My Book Live storage are unfortunately living that very nightmare as they suddenly discover their external drives wiped clean. It turns out they may have been the victims of a malicious hacker that simply deleted their data, no ransoms asked.

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Many people these days extol saving your files to the cloud and cloud storage providers have likewise expanded to target enterprise customers with features like encryption, backups, and the like. While that seems to be fine for the majority of professional office work, there are other professional enterprises where cloud storage just doesn't cut it. Creative industries, like those in movie-making and photography, still rely on local data storage and Western Digital's new SanDisk Professional brand is taking aim at that segment with premium-sounding, and possibly premium-priced, storage solutions.

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This week the folks at Western Digital revealed their latest external WD_BLACK D30 game drive SSD. This new storage solution was made specifically to work with gaming consoles like PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, right out the gate. UPDATE: There are two WD_BLACK D30 devices, one just called D30 Game Drive SSD, the other specifically branded with the word "Xbox".

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This week WD announced a set of devices that'd be getting upgrades for the new year. The SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD, the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD (non-pro), the WD_Black P50 Game Drive SSD, and the My Passport SSD from WD will all be given new iterations in the market with 4TB storage inside. They'll be priced between $679.99 and $749.99 dependent on model.

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SanDisk and parent company Western Digital are best known for their data storage products, with the former specializing in flash storage for USB drives and SD cards. Both, however, have also dipped their hands in other markets related to consumer electronics and the digital lifestyle. Their latest act it to get in on the wireless charging train with the new Ixpand Wireless Charger Sync and the Ixpand Wireless Charger 15W, though only one might actually catch your attention.

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Today Western Digital revealed several new SSD products all aimed at a top-tier next-gen gaming experience. Included in the release were the WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD, the WD_BLACK AN1500 NVMe SSD Add-in-Card, and the WD_BLACK D50 Game Dock NVMe SSD. The NVMe SSD with next-gen PCIe Gen4 technology rolls with up to 7000 MB/s sequential read speeds and up to 1M IOPs, so says Western Digital.

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A lot of the narrative around protecting user data often happens in the context of the cloud or the Internet, where data is often vulnerable to snooping and hijacking. Data stored on local storage, however, are just as or even more vulnerable, especially when talking about portable external storage. Encryption is, of course, an option, but one that comes as the cost of speed and flexibility. Western Digital is now boasting that its new ArmorLock encrypted NVMe SSD can let you have your security cake and eat it, too.

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Western Digital announced a new addition to its lineup of My Passport external SSDs today. Simply called the My Passport SSD from WD, it might be somewhat easy to confuse this new SSD with other ones, but it seems the hardware inside will be the real difference maker. WD's My Passport SSD uses NVMe drives, which promises solid read and write speeds in an external drive that has a smaller footprint than previous models.

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Western Digital, one of the biggest names in the data storage industry, got dragged into a rather complicated controversy regarding hard disk technology and marketing. That drama also dragged others like Seagate and Toshiba, though all three companies have, by now, made their official statements and clarifications. WD, however, is still working to clarify its position and its product line and it is doing so by introducing a third category in its Red family of NAS drives.

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