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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You might think that buying and using a hard drive is a simple matter of picking one from a catalog and connecting it inside a computer. That may be true fro the simplest of desktops but when you factor in devices like NAS products, the selection process can be quite daunting, especially when data storage manufacturers aren't so forthcoming with critical details. To dispel any lingering doubt and confusion, Toshiba and Western Digital have released the list of hard drives that use the now somewhat controversial SMR technology and which ones don't.
![WD, Seagate, Toshiba allegedly sell SMR drives without telling buyers [UPDATE]](https://www.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/wd-red-nas-1280x720.jpg)
People might take hard drives for granted these days. After all, their use of moving parts makes them less suited for mobile devices and their bulky sizes give off an "old school" vibe. Hard disks and their magnetic plates and moving read/write heads, however, still trump Flash NAND technology when it comes to capacity, which is why they are still the go-to for large storage devices like NAS. Unfortunately, picking out a hard drive is harder than you might think, especially when manufacturers themselves aren't being upfront about the technologies they use.
The way we create and consume media these days has pretty much changed the way we store and retrieve data. Large hard drives with their moving heads and spinning disks still have a home in desktops and data centers but regular consumers would prefer more durable and more portable storage devices for the modern lifestyle. At CES 2020, Western Digital is showing off a few new products to address that need, including a portable SSD with an 8 TB capacity and 20 Gbps SuperSpeed.
This week the folks at Western Digital released a new collection of WD_Black series hard drives (HDD and SSD) with radical new industrial designs. When you're buying a hard disk drive or solid-state drive, especially an external HDD or SSD, you'll first look at the capabilities of the drive - mostly innards. Then you'll look at the external bits - the way the case looks, the bits you'll be seeing every time you access your gaming machine. Because of this, Western Digital went the extra mile (in the right direction) with their latest round of WD_Black.
Those of you who have been waiting for a high-capacity microSD card with fast transfer speeds might like what Western Digital is showing off at MWC this year. The company has announced a new 1TB microSDXC card that it claims is the fastest UHS-I card in the world. Officially dubbed the 1TB SanDisk Extreme UHS-I microSDXC card (which is quite the mouthful), prospective buyers might want to start saving now, because it certainly has the price tag to match its high capacity and potential transfer speeds.
The WD Black SN750 NVMe SSD was revealed this week with an aim to take on the most performance-hungry PC gaming rigs. It'll do this with up to 2TB capacity on a single-sided M.2 form factor ...which is super duper, BUT, the version we're interested in is the one with an integrated heatsink. There'll be versions with the heatsink and versions without, the versions without will be released first, then the heatsink second.