Articles about Western Digital

Embracing cloud storage is a smart move -- it ensures your data is safe even if your computer fails or if there is a disaster that impacts your home. Quite frankly, it helps me to sleep better at night knowing my precious family photos and videos are stored in the cloud.

When you keep your files exclusively in the cloud, however, you lose control. If the storage company goes out of business or gets hacked, you could potentially lose everything. That's why it is wise to embrace a redundancy strategy of storing files both in the cloud and locally. Today, Western Digital launches the My Passport Ultra for that exact usage case -- it comes with free specialized software for cloud backups. With capacities up to 4TB, it should meet the needs of many consumers.

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Thanks to media streaming and cloud storage, many home consumers no longer need massive hard disk drives. Instead, a fast SSD with a lesser capacity can often meet needs. Of course that isn't a fact for everyone -- some folks still prefer local storage, and mechanical HDDs are ideal from a cost perspective.

Home users aside, businesses still largely have a need for hard drives with large capacities. Trade secrets and customer information can't always be stored in the cloud. While some data centers are embracing solid state drives for better performance, that is not really cost effective at this time. Today, Western Digital begins shipping the 12TB HGST Ultrastar He12 Helium 7200 RPM hard disk drive. This is a HDD with monstrous capacity that is designed for the enterprise.

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The newest MacBook Pro only has USB-C ports. For some, this can be a pain point. For others, it is refreshing to only have the most modern connectors. As time marches on, other manufacturers will likely follow Apple by forgoing USB Type-A entirely too.

Today, G-Technology unveils a beautiful new external storage drive. Called "G-DRIVE USB-C," it is designed for the MacBook and MacBook Pro, but it will work with Windows and Linux too (a Type-A cable is included in the box). The 3.5-inch 5400 RPM drive features speeds up to 195MB/s, is available in capacities up to 10TB, and offers power-delivery so it can charge your Mac too -- how cool is that?

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Solid state drives are absolutely brilliant when installed inside a PC. You know where else they work well? Outside the computer too. As an external storage drive, an SSD offers great speed, but, more importantly, added durability too. Unlike a mechanical external hard disk drive, an SSD does not have moving parts. This makes it a much better option for those that need to take an external storage drive with them when on the go.

Today, Western Digital announces a beautiful new external storage drive. Called "My Passport SSD," the diminutive drive has a single USB-C port for both power and data. Featuring up to 1TB of capacity, it would be an excellent tool for content creators, or anyone that needs additional storage.

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Solid state drives are one of the greatest things to ever happen to computers. Whether for business or personal computing, these SSDs have increased disk access performance dramatically. Heck, for mobile devices like laptops, the switch from physical hard drives has also improved battery life, while better protecting data from bumps and jostles.

As great as these solid state drives are now, they are only getting better. For example, SATA-based SSDs were once viewed as miraculous, but they are now looked at as slow -- PCIe-based NVMe drives are all the rage. To highlight the steady evolution of flash storage, Western Digital today unveils the first-ever 512 gigabit 64-layer 3D NAND chip.

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USB hard drives can be an important part of your backup plans. Whether for home or business, they allow you to easily backup your files and then take them with you. You can even lock the drive in a safe for extra security. While you can also use the cloud for backing up data, redundancy with a USB HDD is very smart -- just in case.

Western Digital's USB hard disk drives are wildly popular, and today, the company announces a refresh of two such models for Windows and Mac -- the 'My Passport' and 'My Book'. The concept is the same -- a mechanical hard drive in a USB 3.0 enclosure -- but they are now more stylish. The My Passport comes in six fun colors -- the Type-A cable even matches!

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Cloud storage is amazingly convenient. Unfortunately, the best part of the cloud can also be the worst. You see, having your files stored on someone else's severs and accessing them over the internet opens you to focused hacking, and potentially, incompetence by the cloud storage company too. As a way to have the best of both worlds, some folks will set up net-connected local storage so they can manage their own 'cloud'.

Today, Canonical and Western Digital (WDLabs) unveil an Ubuntu Core Linux-based cloud storage and 'Internet of Things' device called 'Nextcloud Box'. The box leverages the open source Nextcloud service and can be powered by a Raspberry Pi 2, Raspberry Pi 3, or oDroid C2. Will it be easier to use and manage than closed source solutions?

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Even though solid state drives are all the rage nowadays from a performance standpoint, mechanical hard drives still reign supreme for capacity. While SSDs should eventually catch up to HDDs in this regard, that is not going to happen any time soon. Even when SSDs do reach capacity parity, their prices will not. In other words, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for an affordable 10TB solid state drive.

Speaking of 10TB hard disk drives, today, Western Digital announces a datacenter HDD with that capacity. This is the company's highest-capacity 'WD Gold' drive ever.

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Micro SD cards are small enough -- any smaller and it would be downright ridiculous. Think about it, folks, they are already too easy to lose. A better way to push the envelope with these miniature storage cards is speed and capacity.

Today, Western Digital announces the SanDisk Extreme 256GB microSDXC UHS-I, which it claims to be the world's fastest such card. Whether you are recording 4K video on a GoPro, or accessing files on your smartphone, the storage media can never be too fast, am I right? In addition to the aforementioned card, the company also announces the less-expensive and slightly slower 256GB SanDisk Ultra microSDXC UHS-I card, Premium Edition.

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The Raspberry Pi line of computers are so much fun. By utilizing an OS-loaded memory card, it is easy to get started, making it a great project for young technology enthusiasts.

But what if you prefer a larger mechanical hard disk drive to an SD card? Sure, you can leverage a USB variant, but they typically aren't designed for the Raspberry Pi. Today, Western Digital announces a Raspberry Pi-focused HDD, called the WD PiDrive 314GB. Yes, as you can probably guess from the name, the low-power drive features 314 gigabytes.

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As the world's home users trend towards greater cloud-storage adoption, the enterprise continues to -- wisely -- embrace on-premise storage too. Don't forget, the cloud is not magic either; the online storage companies need hard disk drives to store all of this data.

Today, Western Digital's HGST subsidiary announces that it is shipping the world's first 10TB hard disk drive. Featuring perpendicular magnetic recording and a helium-filled body, it is on the cutting-edge. Data center maintainers should go absolutely gaga.

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Data storage company Western Digital is acquiring another data storage company, SanDisk, thus creating a true behemoth in the industry.

According to Western Digital, it has to shell out $19 billion (£12.3bn) for the acquisition, which means SanDisk’s stock is worth $86.50 per share (£55.9).

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Security researchers have discovered that a number of Western Digital drives -- including many My Passport and My Book devices -- are blighted with serious vulnerabilities that leave encrypted data stored on them accessible by attackers. The self-encrypting drives were found to be so insecure that it was possible to recover data without the need for the relevant password.

A paper published at the end of September provides details of how some Western Digital drives are susceptible to brute force type attacks, and there are even some models which store the decryption key on the drive. Western Digital would almost certainly rather people were talking about its purchase of SanDisk, but people are more likely to be interested in the company's seemingly terrible approach to security.

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Both Western Digital and Seagate are set to launch the latest entries in their portable hard drive ranges, bringing consumers more storage than ever before.

As more and more high resolution images and videos are being used by consumers, the demand for storage has grown rapidly in recent years.

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