 We're checking out those new super fast SSDs right here. Hi. Hi, good morning. So please introduce yourself. Yes, my name is Fabio Cochella. I'm the Senior Product Marketing Manager from Western Digital. Hi everyone. And this right here that I'm testing out on, I'm trying to see if this is the smartest move for anyone who buys a MacBook M1, the M1 MacBook Pro or Air or Mini is that they can just buy the smallest internal SSD and then use a huge external SSD. And today you're announcing very high capacity, right? Correct, correct. So we just recently introduced basically this week at CES, the virtual CES. So the latest capacity addition. So essentially we are launching the four terabytes capacity size on all the SanDisk portable SSD and the WD portable SSDs. You actually have them right there, right? Yeah, precisely. So I can either show it to you here. This is the Xtreme Pro SanDisk Xtreme Pro portable SSD. Hope you can see it properly. So this one is the top of the line on the SanDisk side. So because it's featuring NVMe technology inside with a USB 3.2 generation 2x2. So this goes to four terabytes? No. It goes up to four terabytes. It's available in one, two, four terabytes. You have another camera so you can show. Absolutely. Yeah. So you can see basically all the lineup is here. These are the SanDisk ones. The little brother is the SanDisk Xtreme portable SSD and the SanDisk Xtreme Pro portable SSD. So with this one you go up to 1,050 megabyte per second in read and 1,000 megabyte per second in write. With this one you almost double speed with 2,000 megabyte per seconds in both write and read. And MyPassport SSD has also the same performance of the SanDisk Xtreme portable SSD with 1,050 megabyte per second. This was the predecessor of the MyPassport SSD. So this is going out essentially. I just put one USB flash drive just to make you understand better the size of the product as well. So they are really compact, durable design. As you can see the SanDisk ones pretty rugged design. They are IP55 certified. So for waterproof and dust-ready resistance. And you also have Thunderbolt 3 drive, right? With what's it called a G? Exactly. That's the G drive. Let me see if I can show you quickly. That's the G drive mobile Pro SSD. It's out in the market since a while. This is a Thunderbolt 3 device. As you can see you can reach up to 2,800 megabyte per seconds with a 40 gigabit per second interface. Does this one also go up to 4 terabytes? This goes up to 2 terabytes. So that's a lot of very fast storage. It requires your laptop. There's a few laptops now that have USB 3.2 Gen2 X2. Yeah, that's true. That's quite limited out in the market right now. But we see also from many manufacturers there's a trend of adoption rate and there are more and more product launching on this interface. We know that's a pretty high end type of product, which is required especially for creative professional enthusiasts. But it's something that we can trust the market is going there as well. So the mainstream NVMe SSD is mainly nowadays covered by this extreme type of product as well as the MyPassport SSD. Nice. And actually I have right here on my M1 MacBook Air doing a speed test on here. So that means that the M1 MacBook Air is just able to do, if you can see 800, so kind of like a thousand. But that's because this one, they haven't enabled the Gen2 X2, right? It's not backward compatible in this case. So you are reaching up to 10 gigabit per second performance. So you're not benefiting the full 20 gigabit per second in this case. But my use case is actually to edit videos. And I'm trying to figure out in these days, I'm trying to do the tests in Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, and DaVinci Resolve, which is the free app that everybody can use, to try to see if actually to edit 4K 60 videos using the external SSD, maybe it performs just as good, or maybe even better than doing everything in internal. Do you think there's something to that even with not having the full 20 gigabit, but just 10 gigabit? No, I think this would be pretty satisfied with the same level of performance. If you really want to stress the product in one extreme performance, then you still have an option on G-Technology brand with the G-Drive Mobile Pro SSD, which is really targeting the videographer and cinema type of audience. It's a little bit more expensive to have a Thunderbolt 3 drive, right? Yeah, absolutely, because obviously there's some costing side and so on. But maybe for people who use the MacBook M1, they are fine with the Extreme Drive. They don't need the Extreme Pro, maybe, or they can have the previous Extreme Pro, right? The one that just got 1,050 megabyte per second, that should be all covered right there. Yeah, actually not the previous, but it's the one that we just introduced recently at the end of last year. So we speed bump all the range from the previous generation, and we introduce NVMe technology across the entire range, essentially. So now we have 1,000 megabyte per second, also on the Extreme and 2,000 on the Extreme Pro. So definitely you will benefit a lot from that performance level. Because the thing that I'm thinking is that, for example, a MacBook M1 is able to run the software, just the video editor app on the internal SSD, just the app, but it might really benefit from doing some of the files from the external and maybe saving the file on internal or maybe saving it back on the external. And actually, that's the best way. People can get 2 terabyte, even 4 terabyte, much cheaper than what they would pay to Apple if they had to upgrade this internally. Exactly. And then normally you have quite limited space in the internal memory. So that's why you need to attach for sure some external storage to it. So these are available now 4 terabyte. How soon can people buy them and what kind of price? Can you show the other camera again? Yeah. So the 4 terabyte, we just launched at CES in terms of availability will be on the late February. So it's coming up shortly in the channel. Hopefully the price is, of course, is more than a 4 terabyte external hard drive. Absolutely, of course. So 4 terabyte, the price range, it's in the range of $750, street price. So if we're talking about euros, we are in the range of 800 euros for the specific EMEA markets. I think that's pretty much kind of like the pricing that maybe Apple would charge for just 2 terabytes internal. So you can have double the storage and then you have the benefit of having it portable and being able to use it on different devices if you have different devices at home and also put in the pockets and not have to bring your whole MacBook to, if you're afraid, people might lose your data or something. Exactly. So you notice that we have many different brands, different products and different solutions and the consumer normally would probably have a question, a natural question, which is which product should I buy, which product should I go for? So all our products are tailored for specific audiences, but obviously any type of consumer can decide whether to take one or the other. So essentially my passport SSD is for the everyday consumer, the everyday backup for productivity mainly. Well, at the same time on Sunday side, we normally tends to be the brand which is more recognized from photographers and professional photographers. So it's a type of product that's perfect fit for the consumer that's constantly on the go. So do you have also some more data you can show or some, can you show how does look inside the drive? Like there's a special consideration in terms of heat generation, heat dissipation. So you don't need to straddle it too much? Yeah, this is what we were just mentioning earlier. So it's a kind of nice animation where you can see essentially the exploded version of the product, how it looks like. So there's a little red line that you see on the edge of the product. Essentially it's the aluminum forged chassis. It's not just a design element, but it's also a functional element, an essential element that helps to dissipate the heat away from the drive when you're using intensively the drive and operating on it, and it enables the user to benefit from sustained ride and rate speeds in the long term. And at the same time, you can appreciate from this chart the IP555 rating from dust and water, the NVME SSD inside, which is built in-house essentially, and the USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C interface. Can you zoom in a little bit so we can see the this NVME SSD looks really interesting. How does it work? Like is it just this little part is where all the storage is? Exactly. So now finally, we can benefit of internally developed NVME SSD. So we are fully integrated and we're really proud of it. So this is all the area where aside your data in a full secure way also, because we introduced also the hardware encryption with these new products. You have up to 256-bit AES encryption. So it's really, really secure. What's the electronics happening on top there? Is that the thing that does the whole USB 3.2 Gen2x2? Correct. So I guess it's a pretty good chipset that does the whole device part of the product here, right? Yeah. So this is what I was trying to introduce earlier as well in terms of portable SSD portfolio overall from Western Digital with all the brands. So we are trying to satisfy the needs from the customers in each of the single type of use case. So at the same time, we are starting from the main pain points of the customer, which are normally limited capacity, the slow transfer speed, the data and the security, and also the constant access and the reliability from the brand that we are bringing out in the market. So they can fully trust on us. So we have solutions for gamers, as you can see, everyday users, content creators, and professionals. How does that translate into the single specific brands? Essentially, WD is the brand that is normally fully trusted for the everyday creator, for the productivity, for the standard type of backup features. Then Sandisk on the other side, it's for mobility and durability. As we mentioned many times, also the IP 55 rating. WD Black is the brand that we launched in the last 12 to 18 months. So now we are very recognized in this specific segment for gamers. So there's a number of solutions, both internal SSD and external SSD and an HDD that are purpose built for gamers in order to support them with their constant challenges. And then lastly, but not least, G-Technology, which is the professional brand for the videographers, for workflow, for the top performance out there. So and this is what we just mentioned earlier in terms of launch of the highest capacity out there with the 4TB across all the brands. So you can really count on capacity, performance and reliability at the same time combined. Nice. 4TB is a nice number. It's actually huge. You can click on hide, not the step yet. Oh, you can stop it also, yeah. So it's just a question of hopefully that the quantities can go up and the reliability of the yields and everything. And be nice if these drives become affordable even at 4TB, right? The question is that people should just, it should be a no brainer, just get the cheapest MacBook, I'm joking, but why not, but then and just get a huge external drive. Probably 4TB is still a kind of capacity that is required on SSD side that is required for a specific type of consumer, especially business professional or creative professional. Normally, we see that the capacities are trending up and up from month to month. So now we are moving in between from 1TB and 2TB are the most sold capacities. And up to 12 months ago, we were still with the 500 gigabytes. So that's also thanks for the price that is going down a little bit. So the consumer are more and more shifting from HD view to SSD, but HDD drive are still required for high capacity and cold type of storage rather than hot storage. And here you there's this is the video on the WD Black. So this one goes to 4TB also. Yeah, this goes to 4TB as well. It's sharing the same USB technology as the Sundis Xtreme Pro SSD. So it's USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 essentially. So you have the 2000 megabyte per second performance. So we developed this drive specifically for gamers in order to allow them not to be limited for the space they have in their own internal drives or their desktop gaming machine or notebook game machine. So and at the same time bringing the portability elements with them so they can bring the games, the game library everywhere with them and at the same time they can also save their streaming live streaming game live streaming videos on the drive and edit while on the go. Does WD Black perform exactly the same like the Xtreme Pro 2000? So they're both in 2000. Yeah, 2000 both right and right. The same because it looks really cool that WD Black. So people are welcome to just use WD Black to do the more creative stuff. And gamers can also use the other one. Yeah, because gamers, as I just said, gamers tend to be also creative professionals and edit a lot of videos nowadays. So you can either choose one or the other. In terms of heat sink dissipation elements, you don't have the red thing that obviously that you noticed on the Xtreme Pro, but here you have four holes down in the backside in the low side of the product that are used for heat dissipation. And then at the same time you have the metal design that also helps at the same time to dissipate and maintaining sustained speeds. Nice. So this is pretty much a whole range of USB 3.2 Gen2 X2 drive except the Thunderbolt 3G over there. I guess maybe in the future everything is going to be used before, right, in the future maybe. Yeah, that's the trend in one to two years. So nowadays we see that the market is still focused and concentrated on USB 3.2 Gen2 as well as the Gen2 X2. All right. Because when you get to that, then you need to make drives that can go to 40 gigabit, I guess. 40 gigabit, exactly. It's going to be even faster than 2800, no? It's going to be, or I'm not sure, maybe it is 2800. I think it might be even faster, right? 40 gigabit depends. I was trying to interview the USB forum and they say it's a lot to do with the, every laptop manufacturer can decide if they want to do 10 or 20 gigabit or more. Yeah, that's very much abandoned on the host device in the end. So, but our G-Drive Mobile Pro SSD as we were saying, so we are already there with the Thunderbolt 3 interface with 2800 megabyte per second. So we are already there with a 40 gigabit per second performance. I think this drive will actually go to full 2800 or something like that on the MacBook M1 range, I would guess, because they do support the full Thunderbolt 3, I guess. But that's something maybe people can search on YouTube. There might be some people testing this out. I know you are curious to test this one as well. Yeah, but of course, Western Digital is also famous for hard drives. So people can just have also a bunch of external hard drives for like more like archiving, right? And then the SSD is for the work. Yeah, precisely. So SSD is for hot storage when you need to work really on the data and access in a very speed and timely manner. And then otherwise, I also have here my own, my book, Duo 36TB, essentially, where I store everything, all the picture library, all the data there, and save it there for years, essentially. And a few years ago, people were a little bit worried about the life of SSDs, but these are probably going to last pretty much as long as people want to use the device, no? The 10 years or? Yeah, nowadays, we are pretty much in the at the same reliability level, probably even more. That's really in the end depends how much you're writing a terabyte every day, gigabyte or even terabyte per every day. The warranty is going to be very long? The warranty on all these devices that you just saw is five years. That's pretty long. So I guess I would recommend everybody just back up everything on the cloud also. There's more and more archive cloud storage systems, like for more than a year, Amazon has been doing one terabyte for $1 per month on the, they call it, deep archive. And I think Google is doing something also, Google Drive has some unlimited stuff. On the consumer side, at the same time, we also have our own solutions, both for consumer and also for professional, which is the MyCloud family, essentially. So we have a couple of consumer solutions, which are the MyCloud Home and MyCloud Home Duo with the RAID feature. So those are really for the user that are not looking for a complication. They want the easiest setup possible. So those are not really marketed as NAS, but those are marketed as personal cloud. They are private at your home, not in a cloud, whatever in a public cloud. So they are safe at home in your house and you can access the data anywhere where you are. And then we have the MyCloud Pro Expert series and the Pro series, which are more for professional, for small businesses. And those are adding more features in terms of packs, in terms of DRAM included, in terms of chipset, and also in terms of application that you can install on the NAS themselves. But when you talk about the MyCloud, it's basically coast your own cloud at home, right? There's like a little NAS at home. And there's been some updates on this a little bit. Maybe performance has been improving and stuff. Yeah. We recently added an update on the Expert series and the Pro series. We updated the Femur essentially with the new OS 5, where you have more functionality. And also you have a very useful application that you can navigate and use the entire functionality of your NAS directly from your smartphone essentially. And then on the consumer side on MyCloud Home and MyCloud Home Duo, we also included more features from time to time from the beginning of last year. And we have kind of same level of experience that we have also in the E-X series. What I think would be nice is when people buy one of these MyCloud devices that you have some kind of service that you can actually back it up on the cloud. So for the whole life of the device or something, I don't know, 10 years of cloud backup as long as you, I don't know, have it connected or something. And then that'd be nice because what if your house burns? Then you need to have two MyClouds, one of your mother's home or something at the same time, backup by yourself in two different places. I think it'd be nice to have a cloud thing, but I guess you don't sell actual cloud service storage, right? You just sell to the cloud providers and there's more and more. And hopefully 2021 is going to be amazing with new cloud service. It's always hard to find unlimited cloud storage that's officially unlimited because it's really hard. Some people use too much, but maybe very affordable. We tend not to be closed in terms of system because with the application that we are offering with MyCloud Home Application, you can actually access also all the other public clouds and you can sync with the public clouds, transfer in both simultaneous way from the public cloud to your personal cloud at home and vice versa. So we are pretty open and allowing the consumer to be pretty flexible in that. I think one of the little challenges that I would have is sometimes, especially when there's no travel restrictions and I travel different places. For example, when I go to Las Vegas, I never find bandwidth. It's really hard to upload my data and it'd be nice if there was a map or some kind of thing. Maybe Western Digital could work with Google or do a layer in Google Maps somehow. And then you could find in any city a place to upload with full gigabit or 10 gigabit or something. You could plug in your SSD in like for 10 minutes and transfer a few terabytes over and then it will just back it up for you. That would be awesome. But also, I think the 5G going forward might partially solve this problem, right? Yeah. If the 5G is a real and not shared between thousands of people in each hotspot or something, I'm not totally sure how it works. But hopefully, it sounds like crazy fast bandwidth. So that's going to be great. So then you can just add a SIM card to your SSD and upload directly, right? Cool. Thanks a lot. Thanks for showing these new 4TB drives and very fast. Thanks to you for having me. Thanks.