wd

If you were wondering where the solid-state part in WD's new solid-state hybrid drive, the WD Black, comes from, the answer is SanDisk.

The two storage vendors today announced their collaboration in creating solid-state hybrid drives, with the first being the WD Black.

According to both parties, SanDisk is supplying a SanDisk iSSD storage device for the WD Black SSHD. The WD Black comes with up to 32GB of iSSD storage and currently offers a total of 500GB mixed iSSD and platter-based storage.

The drive is superslim, being just 5mm thick while still retaining the 2.5-inch laptop-standard design. … Read more

Western Digital announced on Tuesday the availability of its first solid-state hybrid drive, the WD Black SSHD.

SSHD is the new name for hybrid drives that combine both solid-state storage (used in solid-state drives) and regular platter-based storage (as found in regular hard drives) in a single standard box.

The WD Black is not the first SSHD on the market, but it's very different from the Laptop Thin SSHD that Seagate released just last month.

For one, the WD Black SSD is ultraslim, just 5mm thick (compared with 7mm for the Seagate drives), making it almost half the thickness … Read more

LAS VEGAS--As a fan of internal storage drives, I was like a boy in a candy store meeting up with Western Digital at CES 2013.

The major storage vendor for the first time showed off its very first solid-state hybrid hard drive, the WD Black SSHD. This is the final working product that's being sampled to OEM manufacturers. And it's WD's answer to Seagate's hybrid drives, not only the existing Momentus XT, but also the prototypes it showcased at CES 2013.

SSHD is the new name, used across the industry, for a hybrid drive that uses … Read more

Following its recent announcement of the availability of a new 4TB hard drive, Western Digital today announced that its RAID-capable NAS server, the My Book Live Duo, now offers up to 8TB of storage space.

The My Book Live Duo is the dual-bay version of the single-volume My Book Live and originally had a storage cap of 6TB.

The server houses two user-serviceable 3.5-inch hard drives and supports both RAID 1 and RAID 0 configurations. The top 8TB capacity is available only in the RAID 0 setup, which is fast but provides no redundancy. If you want data safety, … Read more

Western Digital announced today that it's now shipping the 4TB WD Black (model WD4001FAEX) hard drive.

This drive is the highest-capacity hard drive on the market, and spins at 7,200rpm to offer fast data speeds. WD says the WD Black comes with 64MB of cache memory, and supports dual-stage actuator technology and the latest SATA 3 (6Gbps) standard. The drive's integrated dual processor is designed to deliver a high level of performance.

Like other hard drives from WD, the 4TB WB Black supports WE's IntelliSeek, StableTrac, and NoTouch technology. IntelliSeek calculates optimum seek speeds to lower … Read more

WD today announced the availability of its 802.11ac Wi-Fi products, including a new router and a media bridge.

WD, one of the largest hard-drive makers in the world, jumped into home networking just recently with the My Net router family, which includes the already reviewed My Net N900 HD and My Net N900 Central. The two new devices announced today complete the company's Wi-Fi portfolio by adding support for the latest 802.11ac standard.

The two new products include a 802.11ac router, the My Net AC1300 HD Dual-Band router, and a 802.1ac-compatible media bridge, the My … Read more

Western Digital announced today the availability of its WD RE internal 3.5-inch hard drive, which offers up to 4TB of storage space.

This new drive is available in either the SAS or SATA interface standards. The former is used in enterprise/business products such as servers, while the latter is also used in consumer products, such as desktop computers. While WD says the new drive combines capacity with enterprise-class features, the fact that a SATA version of the drive is also available means that consumers can also benefit.… Read more

WD today made the good old portable hard drive concept something totally new again.

The storage vendor announced a new family of portable external hard drives for Macs and Windows PCs, called My Passport Edge, that's ultrasleek and ultraslim.

There are minor differences between the Mac version and the Windows version of the new drive.… Read more

Generally, the term "hard-core" and external hard drives don't go together. This is because external, portable hard drives are probably the most popular and casual type of consumer storage.

But some of them can get really serious, too.

These are external storage devices that are not just fast or rugged, but also are likely to make you think before purchasing due to their cost. In other words, they are not for everyone, but only those who have the need for them and can appreciate their value.

If you are one of these people, the following five drives are totally worth the investment.… Read more