Western Digital Releases 2TB NVMe M.2 SSDs

Today, Western Digital released one new 2TB NVMe SSD for the WD Blue SN550. The company also announced three other NVMe drives that are currently in development. Western Digital was founded 50 years ago as General Digital. Since then, it has become a household name, providing digital storage devices for everything from home use to the data center.

Today, Western Digital released one new 2TB NVMe SSD for the WD Blue SN550. The company also announced three other NVMe drives that are currently in development. Western Digital was founded 50 years ago as General Digital. Since then, it has become a household name, providing digital storage devices for everything from home use to the data center.

Like the other SSDs in Western Digital Blue’s SN550 family, the new 2TB one has an M.2 form factor. At 2TB, it provides twice the storage of the previous highest capacity drive. The line also includes 1TB, 500GB, and 250GB models. Western Digital’s Blue family of storage is all targeted at consumer PCs and laptops. The previous drives have all provided a stable 2,400 sequential reads over the PCIe interface, so while WD has not provided details on the newest model, we can expect that to continue holding true. The story with both sequential write and random read is sunnier. Previous models in the SN550 line have all improved performance over the previous generation in those two areas. Hopefully, that will be true with the latest and densest model as well.

The next two drives are both planned to be released as part of Western Digital’s IX SN530 line. According to the company, the IX line is an industrial grade NVMes designed for extreme temperature, performance, high-endurance, and reliability requirements. The drives boast a very broad operating temperature range, going from negative forty Celsius on the low end to eighty-five Celsius on the high end, according to the company. The SSDs are also specced to survive up to 20Gs of operational vibration, again according to WD. They do all this while maintaining read speeds equivalent to the Blue line. The two new drives are a 2TB NVMe in the M2.2880 form factor and a smaller 1 TB NVMe in the M2.2230 form factor. The company says both models are being sampled currently and are expected out early next year.

The last NVMe device announced by Western Digital today is the Ultrastar DC ZN540 ZNS NVMe SSD. The new SSD includes a vertically integrated, dual-port NVMe controller with capacities of up to 8TB in a standard U.2 form-factor. Leveraging the ZNS specification championed by Western Digital, the new DC ZN540 is a new generation of SSD targeted at multi-tenancy environments and other data-centric applications such as event stream processing. The company makes impressive claims about improved performance for the new drive, but is worryingly short on hard numbers. The drive is part of Western Digital’s Zoned Storage Initiative, which we’ve previously covered. One of the main innovations the company is pushing is zoning memory so that applications control contiguous chunks to speed up access times.

Availability

WD Blue SN550 2TB – Immediately with $249.99 MSRP

WD Blue SN550 at Amazon

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