Western Digital Ups The Game With Powerful New Gaming SSD With NVMe Performance

PC gaming is increasingly immersive, with richer and more intense visual content than ever before, and gamers are faced with making technology choices to maximize their experience. To push leading-edge performance, lower power consumption and extended durability for PC gaming systems, Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ: WDC) today introduced a high-performance Western Digital® Black 3D NVMe™ SSD featuring the company’s own SSD architecture and controller. The drive accelerates data for PC applications to enable users to quickly, access, engage and capture today’s high-resolution video, audio and gaming content.

With growing demand for rich content, PCs must have the capability to run intensive applications and enable the 4K/Ultra HD graphics and video content experiences. To move this immense amount of data quickly and seamlessly, Western Digital developed a new breed of SSDs to help remove the traditional storage bottleneck. This M.2 drive features a new NVMe architecture and controller, which optimally integrates with Western Digital 3D NAND. Western Digital’s new vertically integrated SSD platform was engineered from the ground up, specifically architected to help maximize performance for NVMe SSDs, with advanced power management, durability and endurance for the growing range of applications benefiting from NVMe technology.

“Today’s gaming applications require increasing capability from their PCs, and this will only continue to advance. With our new architecture and controller, the Western Digital Black SSD integrates our 3D NAND technology with the NVMe interface to enable new levels of performance. Whether it’s a new gaming rig or a video-editing workstation, our innovative NVMe drives will power many existing and future environments that enable data to thrive,” said, Mark Grace, senior vice president, Devices Business Unit, Western Digital.

Western Digital Black 3D NVMe SSD – Built to Boost Gaming Systems
With exceptional sequential read (up to 3,400 MB/s for 1TB and 500GB model) and write performance (up to 2,8001MB/s* for 1TB model) combined with up to 1TB capacities, the new drive is ideal for enhancing user experiences in gaming environments that benefit from acceleration of intensive fast data. Additionally, the drives feature up to 500,000 random-read IOPs (for 1TB model) to deliver extreme throughput, which is ideal for multi-threaded applications and data-intensive multitasking environments. The drive offers a five-year limited warranty with up to 600TBW endurance (for 1TB model). The Western Digital Black 3D NVMe SSD is available in the U.S. in capacities of 250GB ($119.99 USD), 500GB ($229.99 USD) and 1TB ($449.99 USD). The new drives will be available by late April 2018 in select Western Digital retailers, e-tailers, resellers, system integrators and distributors globally.

Enabling the possibilities of data, Western Digital offers the industry’s broadest portfolio of products and solutions to help people capture, preserve, access and transform their content. For more information, visit our website: Western Digital.

About Western Digital
Western Digital creates environments for data to thrive. 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.

Western Digital® data-centric solutions are marketed under the G-Technology™, HGST, SanDisk®, Tegile™, Upthere™ and WD® brands.

© 2018 Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Western Digital, the Western Digital logo and WD Black are registered trademarks or trademarks of Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates in the US and/or other countries. The NVMe™ word mark is a trademark of NVM Express, Inc. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. Pictures shown may vary from actual products. Product specifications subject to change without notice. As used for storage capacity, one gigabyte (GB) = one billion bytes and one terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment.

¹One megabyte per second (MB/s) = one million bytes per second. Performance will vary depending on your hardware and software components and configurations.

###

Forward Looking Statements
This news release contains certain forward-looking statements, including the expected availability, benefits, features, pricing and performance of the Western Digital Black 3D 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, 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 (the "SEC"), including our most recently filed periodic report to which your attention is directed. We do not intend to update the information contained in this release.