Western Digital's Flash Innovation Helps Small- to Medium-sized Businesses and WFH Warriors Tackle Extreme Workloads and Collaborate Faster Using NAS

[TheLostSwede]

According to an IDC 2021 FutureScape, by 2021, at least 70% of digitally-enabled small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) will operate under a hybrid model of working, with remote work emerging as a norm. This can put pressure on business owners as they, their staff or IT consultants support advanced use cases like virtualization, collaborative editing and intensive database workloads in order to manage the seamless flow of data.

For SMBs, NAS or network attached storage, is one of the most widely used methods for accessing, sharing and protecting data alongside the cloud. NAS solutions help SMBs solve for latency and remote shared access to data or applications across the network. "SMBs need robust systems that are efficient and intuitive to manage, and in many cases they need some sort of infrastructure on-premises. A NAS solution can benefit SMBs of all sizes, providing the performance, capacity and reliability they need. For more advanced and performance intensive applications, however, the NAS system will need a boost," said Eric Spanneut, vice president of Client and Enterprise SSDs for Western Digital's Flash Business unit. "Our new WD Red SN700 NVMe SSD is the perfect caching solution to complement our WD Red HDDs in a high-capacity NAS environment."



Boost NAS Performance with a New NVMe SSD Cache Solution
Leveraging its strength and leadership in flash, Western Digital today announced the new WD Red SN700 NVMe SSD, a high-endurance, fast-caching solution that accelerates NAS performance for SMB customers.

This powerful new drive is engineered to support 24/7 NAS environments and always-on applications with the ultimate in reliability and endurance. Its fast system responsiveness and I/O performance are perfect for multi-user, multi-application environments, letting SMBs tame their toughest projects from virtualization to collaborative editing to intensive database storage. Its slim "gum stick" design slips right into the NVMe-ready M.2 slot that is available in many of today's leading NAS enclosures.

"NVMe technology is now more integral to QNAP solutions than ever before, with most of our RAID models supporting M.2 SSD caching as a standard," said Tamblyn Calman, sales and marketing director, QNAP. "The WD Red SN700 NVMe SSD helps to further enhance QNAP's product portfolio's storage capabilities by boosting the NAS system's read/write speeds without adding to the overall number of disks in the array."

Key features of the WD Red SN700 NVMe SSD drive include:

High Performance - Delivers up to 3,430 MB/s performance (500 GB and 1 TB models) - more than 5 times the sequential read capability of SATA drives

High Reliability and Endurance - Optimized for 24/7 NAS workload environments offering high reliability and endurance of up to 5,100 TBW (4 TB model) to handle the constant caching of read and rewrite cycles

High Capacity - Offered in capacities from 250 GB to 4 TB to help cover present and future caching needs

Availability

The new WD Red NVMe SSDs join Western Digital's WD Red portfolio of storage solutions that include WD Red HDDs and WD Red SATA SSDs - all purpose-built for NAS. The WD Red SN700 NVMe SSD family is now available from the Western Digital store and through select distribution channel partners. It has a 5-year limited warranty.

Update: Anandtech snagged the pricing for these drives and we're looking at US$65 for the 250 GB drive, US$80 for 500 GB, US$145 for 1 TB, US$ 290 for 2 TB and US$650 for 4 TB.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[lexluthermiester]

Do we have price ranges for these drives?

offering high reliability and endurance of up to 5,100 TBW (4 TB model)

That's not bad. That level of durability implies the use of a higher quality TLC and not QLC..

 

[TheLostSwede]

Do we have price ranges for these drives?


That's not bad. That level of durability implies the use of a higher quality TLC and not QLC..

I would've posted prices if they had provided them. I did look around, but WD doesn't seem to have released the pricing as yet.
Scratch that, had a look again and Anandtech had updated their post with prices which I added below the press release.
The 2 TB drive seems to have the worst TBW rating at "only" 2,500, whereas the 1 TB drive has a rating of 2,000.

 

[john_]

Those prices are ridiculous when there are so many TLC options for much less. And good options.
Western Digital tries to make money from it's brand. And those prices are against us, the consumers. Companies that try to push prices up, should be boycott.

 

[lexluthermiester]

US$650 for 4 TB

That's not a bad price given the durability offered.

whereas the 1 TB drive has a rating of 2,000

That is effectively 2000P/E cycles, which is a solid advancement in NAND durability. I wonder what they've changed?

Those prices are ridiculous when there are so many TLC options for much less.

And much less durability. Context is important.

Western Digital tries to make money from it's brand. And those prices are against us, the consumers. Companies that try to push prices up, should be boycott.

Don't over-react.

 

[TheLostSwede]

That's not a bad price given the durability offered.

That is effectively 2000P/E cycles, which is a solid advancement in NAND durability. I wonder what they've changed?


And much less durability. Context is important.

The 1 and 2TB SKUs are more attractive in terms of price though, as it jumps quite a bit for the 4TB SKU.

I have no idea what has changed, there isn't much information to go on. Some taller stacks of 3D NAND?

 

[lexluthermiester]

Some taller stacks of 3D NAND?

WD was working on 192 and 224 layer NAND stacks, maybe they succeeded?

 

[P4-630]

1 TB, 2000 TBW for US$145 , I might take one for OS drive once my 970 evo died.

 

[trsttte]

I don't get the point of a red m.2, looks like wd is simple capitalizing on the red name, otherwise doesn't make much sense to me.

For raw storage you'd want multiple drives which won't happen with m.2, either sata, u.2 or sas (in either case it would be a 2.5'' drive), and for a cache it doesn't have any meaningful differentiating feature (I can't find any difference in the spec table to the sn750 here)

They don't seem to mention dram cache, so basically a dramless more expensive sn750? That would be some bullshit right there

 

[lexluthermiester]

I don't get the point of a red m.2, looks like wd is simple capitalizing on the red name, otherwise doesn't make much sense to me.

For raw storage you'd want multiple drives which won't happen with m.2, either sata, u.2 or sas (in either case it would be a 2.5'' drive), and for a cache it doesn't have any meaningful differentiating feature (I can't find any difference in the spec table to the sn750 here)

They don't seem to mention dram cache, so basically a dramless more expensive sn750? That would be some bullshit right there

Maybe you missed that parts about the durability then..

 

[trsttte]

Maybe you missed that parts about the durability then..

Indeed, I missed the TBW but the warranty is the same (5 years) and the nand is also more than likely the same (64L TLC) so that durability difference is even more meaningless than usual.

Still looks to me like just pricing shenanigans

In a way I'm happy that my sn750 theoretically just got a new endurance rating, although I won't be anywhere near the limit of either case