Western Digital Corporation showcased a number of updated products at GITEX Technology Week, focusing on both consumer and enterprise markets. “For consumers we’ve got an updated My Cloud Home, the new My Passport SSD, high-capacity SD cards, and the new SanDisk iXpand Base,” said Khwaja Saifuddin, Senior Sales Director, Western Digital, India, Middle East and Africa. “On the enterprise side we’re showcasing large capacities on our Purple drives for surveillance, as well as 12TB WD Gold drives for Big Data workloads”
WD has long been in the market with consumer home storage solutions, but has only recently refreshed their My Cloud Home. As users demand more and more storage for backups, streaming, and sharing content amongst family members, products like My Cloud Home seem to be making more sense to users who are still weary of setting up a NAS at home. “The uptake has been very promising so far for the simple reason that this is not a NAS device,” commented Saifuddin. “This is your personal cloud that can be set up in three steps and accessed easily via an app or your local network. There’s no worrying about hard drive setups or any extremely technical details that you would normally find with a NAS. It also blends in very well with your existing décor – it’s not that scary black box that people normally assume with IT equipment. It’s stylish and functional at the same time, and consumers really like it so far.”
On the Enterprise front, WD’s biggest change has been with its Purple drives, typically used in surveillance systems. With increasing adoption of 4K cameras, these drives are designed to offer even more robust storage, almost future-proofing these systems as they continue to evolve. It’s a ‘install and forget’ solution that WD hopes will service companies for years into the future. SSDs are also seeing an uptake for solutions such as flash-based NAS systems, which is why WD launched their Black drives in 1TB SSD format as well.
Probably one of the highlights was the newly announced SanDisk Ultra 400GB microSD card. Retailing for AED 1,125, it’s the largest capacity microSD card to date from the company, and was launched to keep up with the ever-growing storage needs for the consumer market. “Consumers need a peace of mind when it comes to storage,” says Saifuddin. “No longer are 64GB and 128GB microSD cards enough, given the amount of data and content that people are storing. So with a 400GB microSD card there’s peace of mind that you have enough storage on your device without having to swap out microSD cards.”
