Building a powerful platform by pooling technical capabilities from WD, SanDisk, HGST, etc.
Announced 12TB helium HDD, SSD for data centers, 3D NAND-based micro SD card, etc.

Western Digital announced its 2017 business strategy and set out to build a differentiated data platform that can effectively manage the rapidly increasing amount of data.

At the '2016 Investor Day' held in Irvine, California, USA on the 6th (local time), Western Digital announced that it would implement a powerful platform that brings together the technological capabilities of WD, SanDisk, and HGST covering HDDs and SSDs.

Through this, we plan to provide a platform that can more effectively manage data, the importance of which is increasing for both businesses and general consumers, and further contribute to the continuous growth of the data ecosystem and strengthen industry leadership.

Western Digital plans to drive innovation across the storage industry with its unrivaled portfolio of flash and disk-based technologies. It will accelerate the development of a wide range of client devices and solutions, including the latest flash and HDD technologies, as well as building powerful systems for cloud-scale data centers.

As part of this, Western Digital unveiled a range of new lineups incorporating new flash and disk technologies, including a 12TB helium HDD, high-performance SSDs for data centers, and microSD cards based on 3D NAND technology.

The representative product is the 'SanDisk Edge', a commercial micro SD card with a capacity of up to 256GB that uses 3D NAND storage technology. It is an OEM product that can be used in various industrial fields such as surveillance cameras, black boxes, and drones by incorporating high-capacity 3D NAND technology that can store about 60 hours of FHD video.

In addition, HGST's 'Ultrastar SN200 Series NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) PCIe SSD', which provides random read performance of up to 1.2 million IOPS (input/output per second), and HGST's SAS SSD 'Ultrastar SS200 SAS SSD', which boasts fast speed along with the industry's largest capacity of 7.68TB, were introduced.

Western Digital also introduced a new 12TB HGST Ultrastar He12 PMR hard drive aimed at the data center market, which is currently sampling to select cloud and hyperscale customers. The company is also expanding its helium-based lineup with a 14TB model that pushes the upper limit of maximum capacity based on Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology. Helium hard drives, which are filled with helium using Western Digital's patented HelioSeal process, have shipped more than 12 million units worldwide to date.

In addition, Western Digital plans to launch a new high-performance all-flash platform that achieves industry-leading performance of 18 million IOPS per rack unit in the first half of 2017. Based on this, it is expected to contribute to the activation of industry-standard NVMe SSDs and ‘fast data-based’ cloud-scale applications connected to multiple servers via 2U rack-based PCIe.