Western Digital Empowering Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Transition to NVMe with New WD Gold NVMe SSDs

Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) is enabling small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to easily transition to NVMe™ storage and dramatically improve application performance with a new addition to its portfolio of data center NVMe SSDs: the first enterprise-class NVMe SSD in the WD Gold™ family.

Industry analyst firm IDC expects NVMe unit shipments to reach more than 79 percent of the market by 2023¹. With advancements in multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs, legacy storage technology has become a bottleneck to maximum application performance.

Shipping in early CQ2 2020, the new WD Gold NVMe SSDs will be available in four capacities to channel partners and end customers. The WD Gold NVMe SSD is designed to be the primary storage in servers delivering superior response times, higher throughput and greater scale than existing SATA devices for enterprise applications. WD Gold NVMe SSDs complement recently launched WD Gold HDDs by providing a high-performance storage tier for applications and data sets that requires low latency or high throughput.

The new WD Gold NVMe SSDs are designed with Western Digital's silicon-to-system expertise, from its 3D TLC NAND SSD media to its purpose-built firmware and own integrated controller. Customers have the high reliability for peace of mind that power-loss and data-path protection provide, as well as an extended five-year limited warranty. Secure boot and secure erase provide customers with additional data-management protections.

"Pick any industry - the world is being transformed by data. There is transformation and innovation happening across many IT fronts, and across virtually every industry, large and small, and it's all driven by data," said Phil Bullinger, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center Business at Western Digital. "Transitioning to NVMe is fundamental to unlocking the performance potential of high-speed storage media, enabling new applications, use cases and workloads. The addition of WD Gold NVMe SSDs to our currently shipping high-capacity WD Gold HDDs means channel partners and customers have expanded, robust options to achieve faster time-to-value."

Western Digital's data center solutions address a variety of needs in a fast-moving and ever-changing data technology landscape. Its broad data center portfolio includes its family of Ultrastar® HDDs and SSDs; WD Gold HDDs and SSDs; OpenFlex™ NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) open composable infrastructure; Ultrastar JBOF/JBOD storage platforms; NVMe-oF bridge solutions; and the Ultrastar memory extension drive.

About Western Digital
Western Digital creates environments for data to thrive. As a leader in data infrastructure, the company is driving the innovation needed to help customers capture, preserve, access and transform an ever-increasing diversity of data. Everywhere data lives, from advanced data centers to mobile sensors to personal devices, our industry-leading solutions deliver the possibilities of data. Our data-centric solutions are comprised of the Western Digital®, G-Technology™, SanDisk®, and WD® brands.

¹Worldwide Solid State Drive Forecast Update, 2019–2023 (Dec 2019, IDC Doc #US44492119)

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Western Digital, the Western Digital logo, OpenFlex, Ultrastar and WD Gold are registered trademarks or trademarks of Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. and/or other countries. The NVMe and NVMe-oF word marks are trademarks of NVM Express, Inc. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. Product specifications subject to change without notice. Pictures shown may vary from actual products. Not all products are available in all regions of the world.

Forward-Looking Statements
This news release contains certain forward-looking statements, including the expected availability, benefits, capabilities, capacity, performance, speed and/or other features of the WD Gold NVMe SSD. There are a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate including, among others: changes to specifications from standards organizations, volatility in global economic conditions; business conditions and growth in the storage ecosystem; impact of competitive products and pricing; market acceptance and cost of commodity materials and specialized product components; actions by competitors; unexpected advances in competing technologies; our development and introduction of products based on new technologies and expansion into new data storage markets; risks associated with acquisitions, divestitures, mergers and joint ventures; difficulties or delays in manufacturing; and other risks and uncertainties listed in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the company's most recently filed periodic report, to which your attention is directed. You should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof, and the company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances.