Ah yes, modern clickbait article titles.
They are just splitting WD and SanDisk to before WD bought them, so the ssds will have SanDisk stickers again. They were always made by SanDisk anyway
This sounds like the same thing Toshiba did when it split its flash memory division off as Kioxia.
Except WD already owns a recognisable flash memory brand - Sandisk. Presumably the split will mean that Sandisk will retain its branding like before it merged with WD.
I thought WD was trying to buy out Kioxia. Are they trying to replace SD with Kioxia to go more enterprise?
Aren’t they having technical problems with recent SSDs? To my knowledge there’s an issue with external SSDs, propably a crappy controler which leads to a non-working SSD.
Related article in German: https://www.heise.de/meinung/SSD-Ausfaelle-Western-Digital-verspielt-alles-Vertrauen-9352972.html
They never did make SSDs.
“Most of its SSDs use WD branding rather than SanDisk branding, but it’s still SanDisk at its core. As part of this move, SanDisk will effectively revert to its pre-acquisition state, which means that WD’s current lineup of SSDs should still exist with SanDisk branding, while WD will continue selling spinning hard drives only.”
What about the WD SN850X?
I was gonna say, “Aren’t WD SSDs just white label versions of other manufacturers?”. Turns out, yes.
Sound’s like they’re trying to protect the WD brand from SanDisk’s recent reliability issues.
I imagine they’ll continue to drive SanDisk’s brand into the ground chasing profits and then fully transition back to the WD brand to clean the slate as HDD sales drop towards the end of the decade when the cost per GB of SSD’s overtake them.
Fun story, had a steam deck chew through two of my 512gb micro SD cards from San Disk, requested an RMA for both after lots of trial and error. Multiple emails in broken English later they cede that it’s strange that both of them failed since they’re brand new, and I’m finally able to send them the cards for an RMA.
And I never saw them again.
I tried reaching out multiple times over the course of many months to get the whereabouts of my replacements, and nothing.
4 months later I get an email asking me to rate my replacement and the service I received…
About $80 down the drain. I’ve sworn off SanDisk unless it’s near-literal dirt cheap, and even then nothing important ever goes on a SanDisk.
I still have one good SanDisk USB 3.0 flashdrive. A really, really old one, but with great speeds as well.
All my more recent SanDisk flashdrives failed - and all for the same reason. ECC detected error and locked the unit…
What?!?!? Nooooooo
I am confused as to what Western Digital’s long-term goals are. Are they honestly deciding to become an HDD-only company?
How long is there really going to be a mass market for HDDs?
Someone posted a graph and at current rates the cost per GB should converge around 2030 assuming current trends continue.
I figure sooner as i’d assume HDD costs will increase as the sales volume goes down
Almost all consumer goods are already SSD at this point.
Anytime a HDD goes out in anything at this point it gets replaced with a SSD.
Only things i’d stick with HDD for at this point is heavy storage like NVRs and backups.
Most modern laptops don’t even have a place to put a HDD and I can’t even complain about it you can put way more storage in a m.2 than you can in a 2.5" 9.5mm hdd.
HDDs will still be profitable for at least several years but it’s pretty clear that SSDs are where the market is going.
I am confused as to what Western Digital’s long-term goals are.
Their long term goal is to stay in business to make money for their C-suite, their board of directors, and their stockholders.
E.g. 47 years ago, long before consumer HDDs, long before SSDs, Western Digital had a product that “revolutionized” storage. It was a chip that let you read and write “floppy disks”.
A floppy disk was an 8" diameter flexible, removable, rotating magnetic storage media that stored about 240 Kilobytes of data.
I don’t think WD will still be around 47 years from now, but you never know.
This company is going backwards fasst
Dunno why everyone in here is speculating when the heart of the issue has been right there since the review kicked off: https://www.reuters.com/business/elliott-offers-1-bln-help-separate-western-digitals-flash-business-2022-05-03/
The spinoff is as simple as the current valuation of the two companies together doesn’t make sense. Bank analysts are suggesting the HDD business on its own nearly constitutes the entirety of WDC’s current market valuation. Which means the flash business unit would intrinsically be valued at $0. Which is idiotic, and Elliott knows that. Force the spin off, and WDC will remain close to its current valuation, and the $0 flash BU valuation will immediately be “re-valued” at something significantly more than $0, thus making money for all the shareholders, particularly those with more than 6% ownership in the business.
Preparing for HDDs no longer being the enterprise solution of choice in the future?
Piggybacking never pays.
Just curious, the durability of a SSD (relative to HDD) is driven by the amount of writes to the NAND Layer Cells. I’ve come across products from Kioxia and Solidigm+SK HYNIX on read-only optimised NAND SSD for enterprise/hyperscaler.
Wouldn’t that make sense for clients to pivot towards these types of SSD for cold-storage when price decline fast enough.
And with HDD, the speed be a consideration when running High-Performance Compute/AI stuff.
Designed for modern IT infrastructures, 24G SAS (SAS-4) doubles effective bandwidth over 12Gb/s SAS (SAS-3). Featuring Kioxia’s 5th generation BiCS FLASH™ 3D flash memory, the PM7 Series delivers sequential read performance of up to 4.2Gigabytes (GB) per second (GB/s) and 720K random read IOPS, achieving approximately 20% performance improvement over the previous generation KIOXIA PM6 Series. The new Kioxia drives are available in capacities up to 30.72terabytes (TB), making them the industry’s highest capacity[2] 2.5-inch [3] SAS SSD.
Additional features include:
Dual-port to support redundancy for storage systems that require high reliability.
Flash Die Failure Protection – a Kioxia feature that allows for transparent disabling of a failing flash chip, while maintaining full reliability at the SSD level.
Endurances for a wide range of workloads; read-intensive (1DWPD) and mixed-use (3DWPD).
Security options available[1]; sanitize instant erase (SIE), TCG Enterprise self-encrypting drive (SED) and SED with an additional security option that utilizes a security module validated by the FIPS 140-2 Cryptographic Module Validation Program. FIPS 140-3 validation for the security module is also in process and is expected to be completed in 2022.Probably for the best? Considering the quality of WD SSDs.
The 256 GB WD Black NVMe SSD in this system here has been running flawlessly since 2018… Data point of one, I know, but I can’t complain.
It’s redudndt considering they purchased SanDisk
Western Digital bought SanDisk in 2016.
Western Digital will split into two companies near the second half of 2024:
- Western Digital
- SanDisk
Western will focus on HardDrives.
SanDisk will continue working on SSD’s like it did before being bought by Western.