Western Digital Releases Ultrastar DC SN630 and CL SN720 SSDs

A Pair of SATA-Replacing NVMe SSDs

Western Digital has two new NVMe data centre drives, the Ultrastar DC SN630 and the CL SN720. The new drives are meant as replacements for lower-performing SATA SSDs for the obvious reasons.

Both of the two drives leverage the power of Western Digital’s vertical integration capabilities. That includes an internally developed controller and firmware architectures, and naturally their 64-layer 3D NAND.

Ultrastar DC SN630 NVMe SSD

Western Digital Ultrastar DC SN630 NVMe SSD is a 2.5-inch enterprise-grade drive for cloud storage. It delivers more than three times the IOPS for mixed workloads when compared with legacy SATA drives. The Ultrastar DC SN630 enables cloud architects to increase performance for latency-sensitive workloads. At the same time, it provides excellent QoS.

Recognizing the need for purpose-built drives with varying endurance requirements, the Ultrastar DC SN630 SSD will be available in two configurations: Mixed workloads and read-intensive workloads.

For mixed-use workloads, the Ultrastar DC SN630 SSD comes in capacities between 800GB and 6.4TB and two drive-writes per day (2DWD).

For read-intensive workloads, there are capacities are 960GB to 7.68TB. Here, the DWD is down to 0.8 from the 2 of the mixed drive. They are ideally suited to accelerate applications, including software-defined or hyper-converged infrastructures, OLAP, and media streaming. They will also be great for the rapidly growing IoT segment where low latency is paramount.

With up to 363K IOPS and 2620MB/s performance figures, the drives are sure to beat any SATA solution. Find the detailed specifiactions on the official product page here.

CL SN720 NVMe SSD

Western Digital CL SN720 NVMe SSD is purpose-built for the performance requirements of boot and edge applications. It enables outstanding random read IOPS performance as well as optimal endurance with encryption capabilities. Oh, and it is an M.2 2280 drive and not a 2.5-inch form factor.

With capacities from 256GB to 2TB in the M.2 form factor, the CL SN720 NVMe SSD is for edge servers, content delivery networks, cloud-based gaming, and IoT platforms and gateways.

In figures, the CL SN720 has a performance rating of up to 3250MB/s sequential reads and 1400MB/s writes. The random 4K QD128 performance comes in at 330K. Endurance wise, the CL SN720 has a 1600 TBW rating. More detailed specifications are available on the official product page.

Availability

The CL SN720 is shipping now, so keep your eyes open for that. The Ultrastar DC SN630 SSD is currently sampling with select customers, but broad availability is expected in April.