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WD Demonstrates World’s Fastest 4TB Hybrid Drive at Storage Visions 2015

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MANILA, Philippines – Jan 2015 – WD, a Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) company and world leader in storage solutions, demonstrated the world’s fastest 4 TB hybrid drive at the SATA-IO booth (#205) at Storage Visions 2015 last January 4 and 5 in Las Vegas, NV. WD’s prototype drive utilized the SATA Express PCI-e interface, 4 TB  3.5-inch hybrid hard drive, and up to 128 GB solid state drive to deliver compelling performance and GB-per-dollar solutions for desktop and gaming applications.

The two WD SATA Express interface demonstrations at Storage Visions 2015 included commercially available motherboards from WD partners ASRockand Gigabyte. These systems demonstrated cabled SATA Express PCI-e interconnect flexibility and configuration options for single-volume caching and RAID.

Heavy desktop usage scenarios will benefit from larger cache sizes (64 GB will be demonstrated) by enabling retention of key hot data across multiple applications, which improves overall performance. In WD’s labs, WD’s SATA Express 4 TB drive with 64 GB cache achieved a PCMark8 benchmark score of 4459, demonstrating near-SSD performance at an optimized GB-per-dollar value.

PCMark8 benchmark data collected on Asus Z97-A platform, core i5 3.4GHz, 16GB DRAM GB/$ calculations based on Dec14 retail price sampling
PCMark8 benchmark data collected on Asus Z97-A platform, core i5 3.4GHz, 16GB DRAM GB/$ calculations based on Dec14 retail price sampling

“WD is committed to working with the industry to push the boundaries of what you might expect from a traditional hard drive,” said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president, Storage Technology, WD. “By moving to PCI Express, the industry marries the world’s most popular storage bus with the world’s most popular computer bus. This union provides a solid growth path to innovate new capability, while preserving the ability to plug legacy SATA drives into new SATA Express based computers.”

“WD’s culture is one of strong collaboration with industry partners in a rapidly changing environment,” said Gary Meister, senior vice president of engineering, WD.  “We see the industry moving toward simplification of the overall PC subsystem to a single storage bus based around the PCIe protocol. In this demo, we placed a hard drive, flash NAND and SATAe technology into one package, freeing up one slot in the system and simplifying how our customers could create and maintain such an advanced storage solution.  When our customers ask us to move to the next storage bus, we will have done all the necessary work to be ready to support the move.”

“ASRock is delighted to show speeds of almost 10 Gbit-per-second when RAID striped off of two WD prototype drives,” said James Lee, vice president of ASRock sales and marketing of ASRock. “ASRock is on the forefront of creating new systems and architectures that break through classical bottlenecks.”

“Gigabyte demonstration will show how a WD prototype SATAe drive enables world class gaming experience,” said Jackson Hsu, product planning division manager of Gigabyte. “Included in our demonstration is work we have done with WD to make the combination of a hard disk drive and a flash subsystem look like a single volume to the end user. This allows the power of having separate devices in a system along with the convenience of having only a single drive to manage.”

About WD

WD, a Western Digital company, is a long-time innovator and storage industry leader. As a storage technology pacesetter, the company produces reliable, high-performance hard disk drives and solid state drives. These drives are deployed by OEMs and integrators in desktop and mobile computers, enterprise computing systems, embedded systems and consumer electronics applications, as well as by the company in providing its own storage products. WD’s leading storage devices and systems, networking products, media players and software solutions empower people around the world to easily save, store, protect, share and experience their content on multiple devices. WD was established in 1970 and is headquartered in Irvine, California. For more information, please visit the company’s website at www.wd.com.

Bryan is a geek at heart and a tech enthusiast by choice. He has a strong background in corporate communications, marketing services, and customer relations having worked in the telecommunications and banking sectors for over two decades. In his spare time, he enjoys watching clips on YouTube and binge watching shows on Netflix.

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