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WD's 1TB Xbox storage card is cheaper than ever
WD's 1TB storage card for Xbox Series X/S is down to its best price yet.
Amazon is taking up to 40 percent off WD and SanDisk storage for today only
You can get microSD and SD cards, flash drives and portable drives at a discount.
Amazon discounts a bunch of SSDs and storage devices for Prime Day
Here are the best Amazon Prime Day 2021 deals on SSDs, microSD cards and other storage devices from SanDisk, Crucial, Samsung, and others.
The best external hard drives
By Justin Krajeski This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and Engadget may earn affiliate commission. Read the full guide to external hard drives. We've spent hundreds of hours researching and testing external drives to find the best options for any use and budget. If you want a dependable external drive that has plenty of storage space for documents and photos and is easy to take on the go, get the 2 TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim. But we also have recommendations if you want more storage space, if you want something more reliable or even faster, or if you need to regularly move large amounts of data from one computer to another with an external drive.
You can finally buy the first 1TB microSD card
Have you been salivating at the thought of stuffing a 1TB microSD card into your phone? You can finally act on that impulse. SanDisk has made the record-setting Extreme card available both through its own store and (when it's in stock) through Amazon, giving you a cavernous amount of space for your phone's media collection. It's a U3-rated card, too, so it shouldn't have trouble keeping up with your 4K video recordings.
The best mobile and computer accessory gifts
If there's someone in your life who spends most of their time with a phone in their hand or at a computer, we've got you covered for gift ideas with our holiday gift guide. We've shortlisted 11 great phone and computer accessories that are sure to brighten up their holiday. We mean that literally with the LuMee Duo smartphone case, which has built-in lighting for perfect selfies. Meanwhile, we also threw in a pair of gadgets that can keep their phone battery topped up.
The best portable SSD
By Justin Krajeski This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions that support its work. Read the full article here. After researching 28 external solid-state drives and testing the four most promising contenders in 2017, we found that the best portable SSD is the 500 GB Samsung T5 Portable SSD. Samsung's solid-state drives work reliably, and the T5 was consistently speedier than the competition in our benchmark tests. It supports faster USB 3.1 Gen 2 speeds, too.
WD is developing 40TB hard drives powered by microwaves
Western Digital (WD) may have lost a bid to buy Toshiba's flash memory technology, but is still hard at work on its bread-and-butter hard drives. The company has unveiled a breakthrough called microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) that will allow ever-higher disk capacities, up to 40TB by the year 2025. "Commercialization of MAMR technology will pave the way to higher recording densities and lower cost per terabyte hard disk drives," said VP of research John Rydning in a statement.
Toshiba's latest SSD tech squeezes 128GB onto a tinier chip
Toshiba and (we think) its partner WD have just unveiled the next generation of rapidly evolving flash memory technology. Its 96-layer NAND tech will arrive in 2018 in 3-bit, 32GB (256 gigabit) chip sizes. That will allow for SSDs and other flash products with 40 percent more storage than 64-layer NAND (which WD and Toshiba started manufacturing last month), reducing consumer prices. Furthermore, WD says that the tech is capable of 64GB all the way up to one terabit (125GB) per chip using 4-bit-per-cell technology.
Western Digital unveils its first portable SSD
Western Digital only just started accepting that SSDs are ready for the mainstream, but it's making up for that lost time by launching its first portable SSD just months after unveiling a desktop drive. The simply-named My Passport SSD gives you 256GB, 512GB or 1TB of flash storage in a pocketable and ever-so-slightly fashionable design. While it's not the absolute fastest drive we've seen with a peak 515MB/s sequential read speed (it's a bit faster than Samsung's T3), the new drive is definitely keeping up with the Joneses. It's designed for USB-C (there's a USB-A adapter in the box), touts 256-bit hardware encryption and is tough enough to survive a 6.5ft drop.
Your WD networked drive is vulnerable to remote attacks
If you have one of Western Digital's My Cloud nstorage drives, you might be particularly vulnerable to internet attacks. Exploitee.rs has discovered a number of unpatched security flaws in most My Cloud models that let remote intruders bypass the login, insert their own commands and upload files without permission. In numerous cases, it's a matter of poorly implemented scripts. Also, every command exectued through the web interface has full access to the operating system -- an attacker would have the keys to the kingdom.
SanDisk outs the 'world's first' 1TB SD card
If you handle a lot of 4K video, you'll know that most available SD cards will struggle to handle all of your high-quality footage. The two-year old SanDisk 512GB SD card might take the edge off somewhat, but that isn't all that Western Digital, owner of the SanDisk brand, has got to offer. Today, the storage giant unveiled what it calls the "world's first" 1TB SD card. It's only a prototype, but already the company is touting the card's ability to adequately handle 4K, 8K, VR and 360-degree video when it officially becomes available.
WD's PiDrive gives your Raspberry Pi 314GB of storage
Sure, you can already add storage to your Raspberry Pi, but it's usually an exercise in trade-offs: SD cards don't hold much data, and USB drives (even the portable ones) tend to be too big and power-hungry for a mini PC. WD doesn't think you should have to compromise, though. It's shipping a new PiDrive that stuffs 314GB into a slim design that won't overwhelm the Pi's power system, but is fast enough to make full use of the USB connection. It even has a special version of BerryBoot (a multi-operating system tool) to help you load your platform of choice and fill that abundant space with apps.
The best network-attached storage
This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a buyer's guide to the best technology. Read the full article here. After three weeks of research, plus hands-on testing of a half-dozen finalists, we found that the QNAP TS-251 is the best network-attached storage device (NAS) for people who need one. It has a faster processor and more memory than most NAS near its price, and it has flexible, powerful software that does everything most NAS users need and more.
WD's latest cloud tech gives you a reason to forget Dropbox
Let's be honest: the cloud features bundled with hard drives tend to suck. They're seldom more than nice freebies that you ignore while you set up Dropbox, Google Drive or another more sophisticated option. However, WD (aka Western Digital) might give you an incentive to try its in-house offering. It's launching My Cloud OS 3, a platform that gives connected hard drives (including network-attached storage) some of the features you take for granted on dedicated online services. It'll automatically sync not just between PCs, but from the camera rolls of your mobile devices. You'll have web- and app-based access to your storage, as well. True, you can find this kind of syncing elsewhere, but this gives you an alternative that won't leave you feeling pangs of regret... so long as you're using WD storage, at least.
WD unveils a truly portable Thunderbolt drive for performance junkies
There are already a few portable hard drives that take advantage of Thunderbolt's brisk performance, but they have to plug into a wall outlet -- not very convenient when you're in the field. Western Digital is fixing that discrepancy today by unveiling the My Passport Pro, the first dual-drive Thunderbolt storage that takes its power solely from Intel's high-speed port. The drive isn't the fastest we've seen at about 233 MB/s, but it's still quick on its toes; it can copy that giant video project to your MacBook Pro in roughly half the time it would take on USB 3.0. If you're the sort who would rather not go hunting for power sockets while editing outside of the office, you can grab the My Passport Pro right now for $300 with 2TB of capacity, or $430 in 4TB form.
Western Digital Black2 drive packs both solid-state and spinning storage
Performance-minded PC users frequently want both a fast solid-state drive for crucial apps and a regular hard disk for everything else, but that's not always feasible in the tight space of a laptop. Western Digital is making that two-drive option a practical reality through its new Black2. The design puts both a 120GB SSD and a 1TB spinning disk into a single 2.5-inch SATA enclosure, offering more speed and capacity than you'd find in a typical hybrid drive. It's potentially an ideal blend for gamers and small form factor PC builders, although they'll pay for the privilege -- WD is shipping the Black2 today for $300, or roughly as much as the two drives by themselves. [Thanks, Metayoshi]
First helium-filled 6TB hard drive launched, just not for you
At first glance, an enterprise-class hard drive with unparalleled areal density sounds like a pretty dull affair, right? While the new Ultrastar He6 drive from Western Digital's HGST subsidiary does fit that nap-inducing description, it's also got a couple of exclusive honors to boast about. You see, not only is this the first sealed, helium-filled HDD, but also the largest in a standard 3.5-inch footprint, packing 6TB over seven stacks. We learned during the drive's development that helium's lower density compared with air allows for this storage bump, as well as making it lighter and more energy efficient. It's destined for data centers and the like, with outfits like HP, Netflix, Huawei and CERN already registering their interest. You'd think these HDDs are pretty pricey currently, but let's hope HGST can dial its costs down and do the noble thing of bringing it to consumer rigs in the future.
WD announces My Cloud, an external drive that connects to your home network for $150 (video)
Sure, there are plenty of physical storage options out there, but WD's new My Cloud does a little more than the traditional external hard drives. For starters, and as the name would suggest, My Cloud can connect to your own home (or office) network and allow you to wirelessly transfer files to and from it. What's more interesting here, however, is that WD's making it easy to access the plug-and-play device from anywhere -- for example, you can be in a completely different continent and still be able to upload / download files. There's also a USB 3.0 which acts as an expansion option, Gigabit Ethernet for wired connectivity, DLNA features and an undisclosed dual-core CPU to handle most of the load. Better yet, because it's a local network drive, there's no need to format it for Mac or Windows, making it compatible with both from the get-go and leaving out the need for any unwanted software. To manage things like users, storage space and advanced settings, Western Digital has introduced the companion My Cloud Dashboard, which can be accessed via a desktop application. On the mobile side, there are apps for iOS and Android that allow users to upload photos, videos, documents and other type of files, as well as integrate with cloud services including Google Drive, SkyDrive and Dropbox. The WD My Cloud is now available starting at $150 for the 2TB model, while the beefier 3TB and 4TB variants are priced at $180 and $250, respectively.
WD upgrades NAS-friendly Red drives with 2.5-inch versions and 4TB desktop model
If you're looking for hard drives built to withstand the rigors of network-attached storage, Western Digital has a treat in store for you. The company just expanded its Red line of NAS-ready drives to include 2.5-inch models in 750GB and 1TB capacities; both disks fit into smaller enclosures while maintaining the Red series' power and speed optimizations for always-on media servers. WD is offering a few perks for desktop users, too. The existing 3.5-inch range now includes a high-capacity 4TB drive, and every new Red model ships with NASware 2.0 technology that should improve reliability. All three Red variants are shipping today; the compact 750GB and 1TB disks respectively sell for $79 and $99, while the 4TB behemoth costs $229.
