Western Digital Reveals New Solutions and Delivers Keynote at FMS 2024

[btarunr]

Western Digital, a leader in Flash and HDD data storage, is unveiling groundbreaking solutions and technology demonstrations at FMS 2024 that raise the bar for performance, capacity and efficiency for transformative AI Data Cycle workloads. These innovations cater to diverse market segments from hyperscale cloud to automotive and consumer storage. Attendees will also gain insights from a keynote address by Rob Soderbery, executive vice president and general manager of Western Digital's Flash Business Unit, on Tuesday at 3 PM. During the keynote, Soderbery will delve into the strategic advancements propelling the future of NAND, AI and data storage from the data center to the edge.

"As AI technologies advance and become increasingly embedded in the world around us, the demand for storage will only continue to grow," said Soderbery. "Western Digital's product and technology roadmaps are strategically aligned to ensure our customers have the most advanced, reliable solutions to stay ahead in the rapidly changing AI landscape. This holistic approach ensures that our customers receive the most power-efficient, high-performing and high-capacity solutions tailored to their specific needs. We are excited to showcase our full range of products and new technologies and demonstrate how they can transform AI now and into the future."



AI Innovation from the Data Center to the Edge
The rapid rise of AI, ML, and large language models (LLMs) is challenging companies with two opposing forces. Data generation and consumption are skyrocketing, while organizations face pressure to quickly derive value from this data. Performance, scalability, and efficiency are essential for AI technology stacks as storage demands rise. Western Digital offers a comprehensive storage technology portfolio tailored to support every stage of the evolving AI Data Cycle. Here are some of the company's show highlights:

Data Center:

• Showcasing the company's leading data center products announced in June - including an industry-leading PCIe Gen 5 enterprise-class SSD (eSSD) for compute-intensive applications, a new 64 TB eSSD for storage-intensive applications, and the world's first 32 TB ePMR SMR HDD for massive data storage at scale.
• A BiCS8 128 TB high-capacity QLC eSSD technology demonstration for fast AI data lakes and capacity-intensive performance applications.
• The new RapidFlex interposer, which converts PCIe SSD signals to Ethernet so now PCIe eSSDs can be deployed in either an Ethernet-switched or a PCIe-switched system architecture as found in the newly enhanced OpenFlex Data24 4200 NVMe-oF storage platform. Disaggregated NVMe-oF storage is a key enabler to making AI workflows more effective and manageable. Come see a captivating demonstration with the Ingrasys ES2100 based on NVIDIA Spectrum Ethernet switch technology and NVIDIA's GPUDirect Storage (GDS) that enables visualization and analysis of large-scale 3D datasets in real time, highlighting a direct data path between NVMe-oF storage and GPU memory to drive scalable, high-performance and efficient utilization of storage and GPU resources for intensive AI applications. The RapidFlex Interposer is now available and is currently being licensed by Ingrasys.

Client:

• Technology demonstrations of BiCS8 performance and mainstream PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSDs for AI PCs, gaming rigs, workstations, laptops and other mobile client PCs.

Automotive:

• The new Western Digital AT EN610 NVMe SSD is an automotive-grade, high-performance, wide-temperature range storage solution designed for the demanding requirements of next-generation high-performance centralized computing (HPCC) architectures. With flexibility through high-capacity TLC with the option to fully or partially configure the drive to high-endurance SLC, the AT EN610 comes in M.2 Type 1620 BGA form factor and offers up to 1 TB of storage capacity. The Western Digital AT EN610 is now sampling.
• The company is also previewing its new Western Digital iNAND AT EU752, targeting advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), infotainment systems (IVI), and other autonomous driving systems. The EU752 is one of the of the most advanced automotive-grade storage solutions, which includes additional features beyond the UFS 4.0 specification like automatic device refresh to prevent data corruption, 100% content pre-loading and more for added performance and reliability. Built on BiCS8 NAND technology, it delivers up to 1 TB and blazing data transfer speeds. The AT EU752 will being sampling in CQ1'25.

Consumer:

• A first look at Western Digital's ground-breaking, high-capacity, high-performance flash-based consumer products that push the boundaries of what's possible. The company is introducing the world's first SanDisk 4 TB microSDUC UHS-I card and world's first SanDisk 8 TB SDUC UHS-I card, built for tomorrow's smartphones, gaming devices, drones, cameras and laptops.
• Demonstrations of its super-sized SSDs - the first-ever 16 TB portable SSD proof of concept, and the 16 TB SanDisk Desk Drive, featuring unprecedented space and performance to keep up with the ever-growing creation and consumption of rich and engaging content.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Bwaze]

Consumer:

• A first look at Western Digital's ground-breaking, high-capacity, high-performance flash-based consumer products that push the boundaries of what's possible. The company is introducing the world's first SanDisk 4 TB microSDUC UHS-I card and world's first SanDisk 8 TB SDUC UHS-I card, built for tomorrow's smartphones, gaming devices, drones, cameras and laptops.
• Demonstrations of its super-sized SSDs - the first-ever 16 TB portable SSD proof of concept, and the 16 TB SanDisk Desk Drive, featuring unprecedented space and performance to keep up with the ever-growing creation and consumption of rich and engaging content.

What about "super sized" internal SSD drives? Not exciting enough? Not needed for this brave new world of ever-growing creation and consumption of rich and engaging content?

 

[Dr. Dro]

Consumer:

• A first look at Western Digital's ground-breaking, high-capacity, high-performance flash-based consumer products that push the boundaries of what's possible. The company is introducing the world's first SanDisk 4 TB microSDUC UHS-I card and world's first SanDisk 8 TB SDUC UHS-I card, built for tomorrow's smartphones, gaming devices, drones, cameras and laptops.
• Demonstrations of its super-sized SSDs - the first-ever 16 TB portable SSD proof of concept, and the 16 TB SanDisk Desk Drive, featuring unprecedented space and performance to keep up with the ever-growing creation and consumption of rich and engaging content.

What about "super sized" internal SSD drives? Not exciting enough? Not needed for this brave new world of ever-growing creation and consumption of rich and engaging content?

The simple fact that they're able to make a fingernail-sized micro SD card at 8 TB (which goes beyond even SDXC spec, they needed to come up with this new SD Ultra Capacity standard) shows how stagnated the PC SSD market has become. It's obviously intentional - neither Western Digital nor Seagate want to stop selling HDDs, after all. That's why we don't get SSDs above 8 TB on client segment, or high-performance for that matter - and also why their cost is so off, it's a shameless cartel.

As customary, every time this topic comes up, I will take the opportunity to advocate for the ruthless death of the SATA port, USB 2.0 connectors, the mp3 codec, and the spinning rust HDD

 

[azrael]

As customary, every time this topic comes up, I will take the opportunity to advocate for the ruthless death of the SATA port, USB 2.0 connectors, the mp3 codec, and the spinning rust HDD

While I agree with the other things you've written I do disagree on abolishing the things you advocate. SATA (or a replacement) is needed so storage doesn't take over the complete motherboard. I know you can get PCIe adapters for nVME drives, but that's not a solution either. USB 2.0 connectors, I'm guessing you're thinking of Type-A connectors. For Type-A USB 2.0 is more resilient. The traces needed for USB 3.x are to thin resulting in much quicker wearout, and not everything needs fast data transfer (mice and keyboards for instance). I'd agree on moving completely over to Type-C connectors, regardless of the protocol used. MP3 I don't have any problems with. I know there are better-quality codecs, but MP3 still does a fine job, all things considered. That leaves the "spinning rust". The idea of going all-flash is very seductive, but what about data retention? And of course we would need much cheaper and much bigger SSDs, which leads us back to the problem: Apparently "Big Storage" doesn't care about that, at least not for consumers.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Yeah it's this "it's good enough" thing that enables companies to pull a fast one on us. As for the data retention concern: this guy on Reddit basically got 4 of some of the lowest quality SSDs you can get and is running his own 4 year experiment

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/16xk59l
A year round unpowered at room temperature caused no data loss whatsoever

 

[Bwaze]

It seems more and more like all the development in server, and now for AI kind of remains completely separate from consumer sector - all we got for the past 5 years is faster sequential speeds - for a while, until cache fills... And falling revenue from this sector just means there is even less reason to invest and advance products, resulting in even more people not buying anything new until old drive completely fails. Catch 22.

 

[GabrielLP14]

i smell like Marvell's Bravera controller alongside Kioxia BiCS8 udpated. They had recently launched the SN860 which was Kioxia BiCS6