Western Digital unveiled new solutions and technology demonstrations at the Future of Memory and Storage Conference 2024. The innovations cater to diverse market segments, from hyperscale cloud to automotive and consumer storage. Attendees also gained insights from a keynote address by Rob Soderbery, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Western Digital’s Flash Business Unit. During the keynote, Soderbery delved into the strategic advancements propelling the future of NAND, AI and data storage from the data centre to the edge.
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 organisations 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 storage technology portfolio tailored to support every stage of the evolving AI Data Cycle. Here are some of the company’s show highlights:
Data centres
• A new 64 TB eSSD for storage-intensive applications, and the world’s first 32TB 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 that PCIe eSSDs can now 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 in making AI workflows more effective and manageable.
Clients
• Technology demonstrations of BiCS8 performance and mainstream PCIe Gen5 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 centralised 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 company also previewed 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 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.
Consumer
• A first look at Western Digital’s high-capacity, high-performance flash-based consumer products pushes the boundaries of what is possible. The company is introducing the world’s first SanDisk 4 TB microSDUC UHS-I card and the world’s first SanDisk 8 TB SDUC UHS-I card, built for smartphones, gaming devices, drones, cameras, and laptops.
• It demonstrated its super-sized SSDs – the first-ever 16 TB portable SSD proof of concept, and the 16 TB SanDisk Desk Drive.
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