Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ:WDC) today announced that several of its SanDisk subsidiaries have filed a Request for Arbitration with the ICC International Court of Arbitration related to three NAND flash-memory joint ventures ("the Flash JVs") operated with Toshiba Corporation ("Toshiba

The arbitration demand seeks among other things an order requiring Toshiba to unwind the transfer to Toshiba Memory, and injunctive relief preventing Toshiba from further breaching the Flash JV agreements by transferring its Flash JV interests, or any interest in an affiliate that holds its Flash JV interests, without SanDisk's consent. Per the provisions of the joint venture agreements, the arbitration will take place in San Francisco, California.

Western Digital chief executive officer Steve Milligan stated, "The Flash JVs have been operated with Toshiba for the past 17 years and have been highly successful for the JV partners and for Japan. We continue to be actively engaged in discussions with Toshiba's stakeholders to ensure that they are fully aware of our joint venture rights and of our desire to work with Toshiba to achieve a favorable outcome for all parties. We firmly believe that we provide Toshiba with the optimal solution to address its challenges, and that we are the best partner to advance its legacy of technology innovation in Japan."

Western Digital Corp. today announced that it has begun shipping its fourth-generation helium-based hard drive with its 12TB HGST-branded Ultrastar He12 hard drive. The Ultrastar He12 12TB hard drive is the next generation of the company's award-winning high capacity enterprise-class drive with HelioSeal technology, providing customers with a data storage solution addressing the expansive information management needs and demanding performance requirements of today's enterprise, cloud and hyperscale workloads.

"We have again raised the bar in enterprise storage with the industry's most advanced and cost-effective highest capacity helium HDD storage solutions," said Mark Grace, senior vice president of devices at Western Digital. "The Ultrastar He12 hard drive advances Western Digital's portfolio leveraging the HelioSeal platform to deliver industry-leading high capacity HDD storage with exceptional power efficiency. Western Digital has shipped over 15M helium-based high capacity drives to date and continues to support our customers with outstanding reliability and Quality of Service (QoS). Our industry-leading data center portfolio enables customers across the spectrum to meet their evolving and dynamic data center demand."

Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ: WDC), a global storage technology and solutions leader, today announced upgrades to its award-winning G-Technology product lines, including the addition of Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C connectivity technologies. The upgrades optimize the speed and performance of these drives, meeting the growing needs of creative professionals who are capturing and transferring vast amounts of high-resolution content.

"G-Technology recognizes the need for a complete workflow solution that takes advantage of the power of Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C," said Sven Rathjen, vice president of marketing, Client Solutions, Western Digital. "The result is a substantial upgrade across several product lines that delivers reliable, fast, and easy-to-use storage solutions to fit the current and future needs of our customers."

Western Digital Corporation, a global storage technology and solutions leader, today introduced its fastest WD brand portable drive yet, the My Passport SSD. Featuring blazing-fast speeds and award-winning design, the new My Passport SSD compliments the company's leading portfolio of My Passport palm-sized storage devices. Designed for content creators and tech enthusiasts, the new My Passport SSD combines exceptional speed and portability to manage massive files on the go.

"The WD brand is focused on delivering fresh, new personal storage devices that offer amazing performance in a beautiful, yet durable design," said Sven Rathjen, vice president of marketing, Client Solutions, Western Digital. "Our fastest portable drive yet, the My Passport SSD is a powerful solution for people who need to move content quickly and easily wherever life takes them."

Western Digital Corporation, a storage industry leader, today announced the availability of the WD Purple 10 TB HDD, the newest member of its high-capacity hard drive line for surveillance applications. According the IHS Markit, anticipated growth of 4K-compliant and high-resolution network cameras over the next few years is driving higher demand for surveillance-class storage to support systems featuring these technologies. With increased capacity and proven leading-edge technology, the WD Purple 10 TB HDD is optimized for 24x7 video surveillance systems and up to 64 high-definition (HD) cameras in home and small business security environments.

"Advanced imaging technology advancements are expanding the value that video surveillance provides for applications ranging from retail and public safety monitoring to smart-city infrastructure, all of which are driving new storage needs," said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing. "Our new 10 TB drive inherits the high performance, reliability and endurance qualities of our WD Purple family, with maximum capacity to offer VARs, integrators and consumers a 4K-ready solution for current and next-generation surveillance systems."

Toshiba may not be dead in the water just yet, but news are dire for the company. After the companyconfirmed it was looking to spin-off its NAND production business so as to sell a minority, 20% stake for much-needed liquidity in the face of amounting debt and multiple management mistakes, reports now announce a much more aggressive stance from the company. It is now apparently looking to sell a majority stake (60%) on the spin-off, in the face of escalating costs and dwindling prospective chances.

Toshiba may be in the ropes for now, but WD, one of its foremost partners (mainly due to its SanDisk acquisition) and most interested party in Toshiba's NAND spin-off efforts, has just announced that it is world first in actually producing a 64-Layer 512 Gb TLC NAND die. WD is developing and producing this 64-layer NAND at its Yokkaichi, Japan fab which it operates alongside - you guessed it - Toshiba, under their joint Flash Forward venture, though there is no indication as to when the new dies will hit full production. The addition of the latest BiCS3 iteration indicates that, despite its recent challenges and snags, Toshiba continues to execute on its semiconductor roadmap, which is certain to be a boon in keeping the value of its NAND production capabilities in the face of the confirmed spin-off and sell-off of a 20% stake on its NAND production business.

There has been some difficulty in achieving any significant ramp-up in 3D NAND production over at the WD-Toshiba venture, with WD having announced a 256 Gb version of the same BiCS 3 technology it employs on the new 512 Gb die last year, to no considerable volume of production. That's one of the reasons for the current NAND shortage and price rises, among other factors, so let's hope all goes well in this ramp up. If all goes well, 1 TB SSD's with 512 Gb TLC NAND dies for $150?

Backblaze has just revealed their HDD failure rates statistics, with updates regarding 2016's Q4 and full-year analysis. These 2016 results join the company's statistics, which started being collected and collated in April 2013, to shed some light on the most - and least reliable - manufacturers. A total of 1,225 drives failed in 2016, which means the drive failure rate for 2016 was just 1.95 percent, a improving over the 2.47 percent that died in 2015 and miles below the 6.39 percent that hit the garbage bin in 2014.

Organizing 2016's failure rates by drive size, independent of manufacturer, we see that 3 TB hard drives are the most reliable (with 1,40% failure rates), with 5 TB hard drives being the least reliable (at a 2,22% failure rate). When we organize the drives by manufacturer, HGST, which powers 34% (24,545) of the total drives (71,939), claims the reliability crown, with a measly 0,60% failure rate, and WDC bringing up the rear on reliability terms, with an average 3,88% failure rate, while simultaneously being one of the least represented manufacturers, with only 1,626 HDDs being used from the manufacturer.

In an AMD-like move to generate more short-term liquidity so as to strengthen its somewhat precarious position, Toshiba may be moving towards one of the most interesting shakeups in the NAND production field: a possible spin-off of its NAND production business into a separate company.

This move to restructure comes in the wake of recent snags and strategic mistakes for the company - such as the $1.2 billion dollar accounting "misstated" earnings, which created difficulties for the company to refinance itself in the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Also not negligible was a gross miscalculation on the amount of debt of the CB&I Stone and Webster company that Toshiba acquired so as to facilitate its U.S.-based Westinghouse Electric nuclear plant subsidiary investment. This "miscalculation", where Toshiba considered the "goodwill" booking charges at $87 million, where recently restated as a roughly-defined "several billion U.S. dollars."

Western Digital has announced the WD Black PCIe SSD, their first PCIe SSD for the consumer market. This particular SSD is aimed at the cheaper half of the M.2 PCIe SSD market rather than competing for the highest performance: it will be available in 256GB and 512GB capacities for $109 and $199.99 respectively, making it cheaper than any currently available M.2 PCIe SSD except the Intel 600p.

Western Digital Corp. today further expanded its data center SSD and HDD portfolio with the introduction of next-generation storage solutions designed to help IT managers address the intensive data and extreme performance demands of today's enterprise, cloud and hyperscale workloads.

The new solutions include the blazingly fast HGST-branded Ultrastar SN200 NVMe-compatible PCIe solid-state drive (SSD) series, which offers class-leading random read performance of up to 1.2 million IOPS in key workloads, and the company's fastest and highest capacity SAS SSD to date, the HGST-branded Ultrastar SS200 Series SSD. The company also introduced its fourth-generation helium-based HelioSeal enterprise-class hard disk drive (HDD), the 12TB HGST-branded Ultrastar He12 drive. Additionally, the company announced it will extend the He12 platform to 14TB, leveraging Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR).

WDLabs, a business growth incubator and accelerator of storage solutions leader Western Digital Corporation, today announced availability of the WD PiDrive Foundation Edition products, which combine microSD card and USB drive functionality with operating system installation software to provide the Raspberry Pi community an integrated and highly affordable storage system solution for fast project creation.

"It is similar to about 30 years ago when hard disk drives went mainstream in PCs - no more swapping floppy disks in and out to load the OS, applications and data," said Dave Chew, chief engineer, WDLabs. "This third generation WD PiDrive solution uses a USB HDD or USB Flash drive to run the OS and host multiple Raspberry Pi projects instead of having to do this on a collection of microSD cards. We have combined our technologies to work as a team."

Western Digital Corporation today announced WD Blue and WD Green solid state drives (SSDs), the first WD-branded SATA client SSDs. The new SSDs complement the company's industry leading family of hard drives for PCs and workstations, providing a full portfolio of WD storage devices for virtually any application.

The ultimate solution for building DIY PCs, extending the life of current PCs or upgrading existing storage, the WD Blue and WD Green SSDs boast near-maximum speed of SATA drives, best-in-class endurance and MTBF and WD Functional Integrity Testing (F.I.T.) Lab certification, resulting in quick boot times and increased program responsiveness. Consumers benefit from the combination of reliable storage with an industry-leading 1.75M hours MTTF, coupled with reduced power and less heat when compared to HDDs. Both include free, downloadable, WD SSD Dashboard software, which allows continuous performance and capacity monitoring. For consumers who are looking for instant-on responsiveness, durability, low power consumption, and ultra-thin, ultramobile form factors, the WD Blue and WD Green SSDs are the perfect options.

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced that its popular HGST-branded Ultrastar SN150 PCI Express (PCIe) NVMe solid state drive (SSD) is now certified for use with VMware Virtual SAN and vSphere. Optimized for easy set-up, the Ultrastar SN150 SSD for VMWare environments reduces latency, and brings hyperscale-level performance and enhanced Quality of Service (QoS) time to virtualized servers and cloud storage. This can significantly lower the total cost of ownership of VMware storage environments over traditional storage architectures by reducing performance tuning and field support costs. In server-side environments where VMware virtualization management is utilized, the Ultrastar SN150 is an ideal option for data center managers building or deploying systems on VMware Virtual SAN or vSphere.

Part of Western Digital's HGST-branded Ultrastar data center storage solutions family, the certified Ultrastar SN150 is available in a low-profile, half-height, half-length (HHHL), add-in card form factor and is one of the first NVMe SSDs in the industry to utilize VMware's in-box NVMe driver. For data center administrators, this helps eliminate the hassle of time-consuming downloads and configurations, and allows faster deployment. The Ultrastar SN150 drive is available in capacities ranging from 1120GB1 to 3820GB and offers speeds which exceed Virtual SAN's highest performance class (Class F) specifications, enabling it to easily address the heaviest data workloads in a variety of virtualized server and storage configurations, including all-flash and hybrid configurations utilizing flash for caching and hard disk drives for storage capacity.

Western Digital Corporation, a world leader in storage solutions, today announced a new, high-capacity configuration of up to 10TB for its award-winning WD Gold datacenter hard drives. Designed for modern enterprise storage systems, WD Gold 10 TB datacenter hard drives feature HelioSeal helium-technology for high capacity, power efficient storage for datacenter environments.

WD Gold datacenter hard drives are designed for a broad range of applications - including small- to medium-scale enterprise servers and storage, and rack-mount datacenter servers and storage enclosures. WD Gold 10 TB datacenter hard drives feature an optimized design over the existing WD Gold 8 TB drives that helps reduce TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of servers and storage systems through an 8 percent operating power reduction while delivering 25 percent more capacity. This benefits IT administrators challenged with keeping up with growing storage demands on limited budgets.

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced the appointment of Mark Long to oversee the company's finance organization as executive vice president, finance, in addition to his role as chief strategy officer. Long will succeed Olivier Leonetti as chief financial officer on Sept. 1, 2016. Leonetti is leaving the company to pursue other opportunities but will continue as CFO through Sept. 1, 2016, reporting to CEO Steve Milligan, and will oversee the completion of the company's fiscal year-end reporting requirements. He will continue in an advisory role to the CEO through Oct. 1, 2016.

"The company is going through a strategic and organizational transformation with the integration of our HGST and WD subsidiaries as well as integrating the recently completed acquisition of SanDisk," said Milligan. "Although in the early stages, we are already seeing the benefits of these strategic steps. As we build on our strategy-driven focus in a tightly integrated manner, it is the right time to combine the strategy and finance organizations and Mark Long is the right leader of this integrated team, with his extensive experience in financial and strategic planning. Olivier Leonetti has made a tremendous contribution to Western Digital in nearly two years as CFO. He played a key role through the successful planning, financing and completion of the SanDisk acquisition. The company is grateful for his contribution and his continued stewardship of our finances through the fiscal year-end reporting process."

Western Digital Corporation, a global storage technology and solutions leader, today introduced the WD Pro Series: My Passport Wireless Pro Wi-Fi mobile storage and My Cloud Pro Series network attached storage (NAS). Designed specifically for the creative community, the WD Pro Series enables seamless transfer of content between devices, with classic WD reliability and speed, regardless of whether users are on a remote shoot, in the studio or editing at home. The products use the My Cloud mobile app - the new version of the app will be launched with the My Passport Wireless Pro and My Cloud Pro Series and be compatible with the Adobe Creative Cloud. In addition, both the My Passport Wireless Pro and My Cloud Pro Series devices are also compatible with the Plex Media Server and My Cloud OS 3 software for easy editing, streaming and sharing of content.

"Portability, reliability, capacity, speed and interoperability are crucial for creative professionals, whose very livelihoods rely on the strength of the technology they use to store their life's work," said Sven Rathjen, vice president of marketing for content solutions at WD. "We created the WD Pro Series as a comprehensive, feature-rich storage solution designed to fit seamlessly into their workflow, regardless of where the work actually happens, so storage, transfer, back-up, editing and even streaming options are readily available."

Western Digital Corporation, a world leader in storage solutions, today announced the expansion of its award-winning color portfolio with a new line; WD Gold datacenter hard drives. WD Gold datacenter hard drives are designed for a broad range of applications - including small- to medium-scale enterprise servers and storage, and rack-mount datacenter servers and storage enclosures. WD Gold drives are currently available at select U.S. distributors, resellers and through the WD Store.

With purpose-driven designs for the datacenter, WD Gold datacenter hard drives are launching with a new, high-capacity configuration of up to 8TB that offers HelioSeal helium-technology for performance, ideal capacity per square foot, power efficiency and low power consumption for datacenter environments. WD Gold datacenter hard drives feature an optimized design with an 8TB option that helps reduce the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of servers and storage systems, benefiting IT administrators challenged with growing storage capacity needs on limited budgets. WD Gold hard drives will also include a premium dedicated support line for customers worldwide.

Western Digital Corporation, a world leader in storage solutions, today announced the expansion of its award-winning portfolio of performance storage solutions with 8 TB capacity drives for NAS, video surveillance and desktop external applications. Increasingly centralized, rich-content, which continues to grow in popularity among enterprises, small business and consumers alike, is driving demand for greater storage capacities.

Launching throughout the first half of 2016, My Cloud personal storage devices (My Cloud, My Cloud Mirror, My Cloud EX2 Ultra), My Book external hard drives (My Book, My Book for Mac, My Book Duo and My Book Pro), WD Red, WD Red Pro and WD Purple hard drives will all be designed with the new high-capacity configuration. Each storage solution offers purpose-driven engineering and HelioSeal helium-technology with the new 8 TB drives for maximum and efficient performance in the applications for which each model is designed.

Western Digital Corporation, a world leader in connected storage solutions, today updated its prosumer solutions with My Cloud EX2 Ultra, a high-performance, two-bay network attached storage (NAS) system. The My Cloud EX2 Ultra NAS is designed from the ground up for creative professionals and prosumers that need to automatically sync content across computers, easily share files and folders and enjoy multiple backup options so they can create their own personalized digital library with ease.

"We know our My Cloud users, especially creative professionals, need comprehensive solutions as digital storage needs continue to soar as well as the need for ongoing streaming capability," said Jim Welsh, executive vice president, WD Branded Products. "With the My Cloud EX2 Ultra, creative professionals are able to combine high performance with multi-tasking optimization and data protection to create a NAS system that simplifies their workflow and provides peace-of-mind."

This week on TechPowerUp News: New AMD CPUs and APUs hit the stores; Seagate served a class-action lawsuit over false reliability claims of its hard drives; and more details of AMD "Zen" architecture.

Hard drive major Seagate has been hit with a class action lawsuit, accusing it of abnormally high failure rates for its 1.5 TB and 3 TB internal and external/portable hard drives. It also accuses the company of false claims over "reliability" and "dependability" in its marketing.

The lawsuit cites data aggregated by cloud solutions company Backblaze. According to this data, a 3 TB Seagate hard drive is three times as likely to fail, as a Western Digital (WD) 3 TB hard drive. It's also ten times as likely to fail as a Hitachi drive. The data appears to look at percentage failure rate, and not raw failed drive volumes, so market-share and volumes shipped by each company is not relevant. Seagate is yet to respond to the lawsuit.

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) today reported revenue of $3.3 billion and net income of $251 million, or $1.07 per share, for its second fiscal quarter ended Jan. 1, 2016. On a non-GAAP basis, net income was $374 million, or $1.60 per share. In the year-ago quarter, the company reported revenue of $3.9 billion and net income of $438 million, or $1.84 per share. Non-GAAP net income in the year-ago quarter was $539 million, or $2.26 per share.

The company generated $598 million in cash from operations during the second fiscal quarter, ending with total cash and cash equivalents of $5.4 billion. On Nov. 3, 2015 the company declared a cash dividend of $0.50 per share of its common stock, which was paid on Jan. 15, 2016.

"We continue to execute well as we manage our business within an increasingly challenging global economic environment," said Steve Milligan, chief executive officer. "Despite a lower-than-expected hard drive total available market, we reported revenue and EPS within our guidance range, with non-GAAP gross margin of 28.5 percent. We also had strong free cash flow performance of $449 million. Our storage shipments for the December quarter grew to 69.1 exabytes."

In this week's TechPowerUp News - WD's whopping $19 billion acquisition of NAND flash major SanDisk and what it could mean for both brands, MSI's insanely powerful all-in-one gaming desktop; and a fully-integrated NUC desktop by Intel following three generations of the revolutionary platform. Also, an exclusive sneak peek at SilverStone's Raven RVX01 mid-tower case!

WD, a Western Digital company, today introduced the My Book Pro storage device, providing professionals and enthusiasts who must efficiently manage large amounts of digital content with up to 435 MB/s transfer rates on WD's fastest external storage solution yet.

With capacity options including 6 TB, 8 TB, 10 TB and 12 TB, the power of two 7200 RPM WD drives with Intel's Thunderbolt 2 technology and a hot-swappable hardware RAID controller, the My Book Pro device enables creative professionals and enthusiasts alike to focus on what they love doing by significantly cutting the time to transfer large videos, photos and audio files.