Western Digital presented the world’s largest capacity SD and microSD cards, a large-capacity external SSD, as well as several advanced storage solutions for corporate clients.
Image source: westerndigital.com
Western Digital, which owns the SanDisk brand, presented new products at the Future Memory and Storage Conference. These included the world’s first SanDisk microSDUC UHS-I memory card with a capacity of 4 TB and the even larger SDUC UHS-I with a capacity of 8 TB. They offer speeds of up to 100 MB/s and, according to the manufacturer, are suitable for smartphones, gaming devices, drones, cameras and laptops. Another product aimed at consumers was the 16 TB SanDisk Desk Drive, twice the capacity of the company’s largest external SSD. A portable version of the drive is also being prepared, probably in the SanDisk Extreme Portable line.
The manufacturer also demonstrated at the event the high speed of BiCS8 memory and mass-market NVMe PCIe 5.0 drives designed to run on PCs with AI. Western Digital used 8th generation NAND QLC memory in a 128 TB SSD designed for enterprise customers, aimed at AI systems and applications with large storage needs. The 32 TB ePMR SMR hard drive was also shown at the event. Finally, Western Digital demonstrated a RapidFlex adapter that converts PCIe signals to Ethernet – it can be used in the OpenFlex Data24 4200 NVMe-oF platform.
The manufacturer has not yet announced prices and release dates for SD cards for consumer solid-state drives.