Western Digital has announced its new family of enterprise SSDs aimed at mixed-use-case workloads. The new drives use in-house developed components and come in EDSFF E1.L, U.2, and M.2-22110 form-factors offering capacities of up to 30.72 TB.

Based on controllers developed by Western Digital internally as well as 96-layer BICS4 3D TLC NAND, the Ultrastar DC SN640 SSDs are aimed at performance-demanding business-critical mixed-workload applications, including SQL Server, MySQL, VMware vSAN, Microsoft Azure Stack HCI solutions, virtual desktops, and other. When it comes to feature set, the drives support power loss protection, AES-256 data encryption, Instant Secure Erase, signed firmware downloads, and other technologies.

Depending on target applications, Western Digital will offer its Ultrastar DC SN640 in three form-factors. For those who need maximum performance and capacity, the manufacturer will offer SSDs in EDSFF E1.L form-factor that will offer capacities of up to 30.72 TB as well as up to 720K random read IOPS. For blade servers running virtual desktops and similar software the maker will offer U.2 SSDs featuring up to 7.68 TB capacities. For space-constrained and OCP environments, the Ultrastar DC SN640 drives will be available in M.2-22110 form-factor as well as capacities of up to 3.84 TB. Considering the workloads, the new SSDs offer tunable endurance of 0.8 or 2 DWPD over five years.

As far as performance is concerned, the Ultrastar DC SN640 6.4 TB U.2 SSD is rated for up to 3.2 GB/s sequential read speeds, up to 2.14 GB/s sequential write speeds, up to 480K random read IOPS, and up to 120K random write IOPS.

Western Digital's Ultrastar DC SN640 SSDs
  2.5-Inch
U2
M.2-22110 EDSFF E1.L
Capacities 0.8 DWPD 800 GB
1,600 GB
3,200 GB
6,400 GB
960 GB
1,600 GB
3,840 GB
7.68 TB
15.36 TB
30.72 TB
2 DWPD 960 GB
1,920 GB
3,840 GB
7,680 GB
- -
Interface PCIe 3.0 x4 (NVMe)
Controller Proprietary
NAND 96-layer BICS4 3D TLC NAND
Sequential Read up to 3200 MB/s
Sequential Write up to 2140 MB/s
Random Read (4 KB) IOPS up to 480K IOPS
Random Write (4 KB) IOPS up to 120K IOPS
Mixed Random Read/Write
(max IOPS 70%R/30%W, 4KB)
up to 240K IOPS
Power Active 12 W 8.25 W 20 W
Encryption AES-256
Power Loss Protection Yes
MTBF 2 million hours
Warranty Five years
Note: Performance numbers are based on 6.4 TB U.2 SSD

Samples of Western Digital’s Ultrastar DC SN640 SSDs are now available to the company’s customers and will ship commercially later.

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Source: Western Digital

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  • austinsguitar - Wednesday, August 7, 2019 - link

    this is weird to say but i think WD is making great progress in the ssd oem market. its very good to see because i know they have been having fab and hdd troubles lately. hope things go okay for them in the near future.
  • ksec - Wednesday, August 7, 2019 - link

    1U can do 32x EDSFF Long, which means 32x 30.72TB = 983TB ( Just short of a PB ). And that is only on a 96-layer BICS4 3D TLC NAND. And that 41PB in a single Rack!. And in the not far future 100PB in a Rack.

    You could fit the whole of DropBox into a few of these Racks!.
  • jordanclock - Wednesday, August 7, 2019 - link

    And a mere ~26kW power usage!
  • allenb - Wednesday, August 7, 2019 - link

    Pretty sure the 0.8 and 2 DWPD numbers for the U2 drives are reversed.
  • MrCommunistGen - Thursday, August 8, 2019 - link

    Agreed.
  • twtech - Thursday, August 8, 2019 - link

    I remember when it was a common assertion that SSDs might not have much of a future, because the capacities wouldn't scale enough to keep up with mechanical disk technologies.

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