Western Digital Starts Sales of WD_Black P50 USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 SSDs

Western Digital has started sales of its WD_Black P50 SSDs that were announced earlier this year. The drives are aimed at the high-performance market and are among the first peripherals to support USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, which offers a full 20Gbps over a USB-C cable.

The WD_Black P50 Game Drive is an external storage device containing an internal NVMe SSD, with capacities of 500 GB, 1 TB, or 2 TB. The device offers a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Type-C interface via ASMedia’s ASM2364 USB-to-PCIe bridge, driving peak interface transfer rates of up to 20 Gbps (2.5 GB/s).

As one of the fastest consumer-grade external SSDs available today and among the first 2x2 devices, the WD_Black P50 SSD is on the cutting edge for USB devices. However, as with the launch of any new USB standard, the market starts at 0 for both hosts and peripherals; so the number of hosts that can actually use the drive at its full interface speed is still very limited. The number of hosts will grow over time – we're already seeing 2x2 controllers show up in new Threadripper motherboards – but for those who do not want to pay extra for the USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 technology, Western Digital does also offer the SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD, which uses a more common USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface at 10 Gbps.

Western Digital’s WD_Black P50 external SSDs are currently offered by the company’s own online store with ETA between one and two weeks in the US. The 500 GB version is priced at $149.99, the 1 TB SKU costs $239.99, and the 2 TB model carries a $399.99 MSRP. It remains to be seen whether the drives will make it to retailers like Amazon or Newegg this holiday season, but it makes a great deal of sense for the company to start sales of its high-end product as soon as possible.

Related Reading:

Sources: Western Digital, PC Watch

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

Image
Intel on Thursday notified its partners and customers that it would be discontinuing its Itanium 9700-series (codenamed Kittson) processors, the last Itanium chips on the market. Under their product discontinuance plan, Intel will cease shipments of Itanium CPUs in mid-2021, or a bit over two years from now. The impact to hardware vendors should be minimal – at this point HP Enterprise is the only company still buying the chips – but it nonetheless marks the end of an era for Intel and their interesting experiment into a non-x86 VLIW-style architecture. The current-generation octa and quad-core Itanium 9700-series processors were introduced by Intel in 2017, in the process becoming the final processors based on the IA-64 ISA. Kittson for its part was a clockspeed-enhanced version of the Itanium 9500-series ‘Poulson’ microarchitecture launched in 2012, and featured a 12 instructions per cycle issue width, 4-way Hyper-Threading, and multiple RAS capabilities not found on Xeon pr
Read more

Intel Axes 10nm CPU Based NUC

Image
Intel has notified its partners about plans to discontinue its only 10nm small form factor NUC in the market. The NUC, which went under the code name of Crimson Canyon, is/was Intel's only 10nm device in this market - it used Cannon Lake processors made on its 10 nm technology, and paired with AMD’s Radeon 540 graphics.  The fate of Intel’s Cannon Lake processors has been, to put it mildly, 'dead on arrival'. Delayed by over a year because of problems with 10 nm fabrication process, the CPUs suffered low yields and had design selections made that resulted in a non-functioning integrated GPU, as well as high power consumption: the Core i3-8121U processor at the heart of Intel's first generation 10nm ended up in a few China-only laptops ( which we reviewed ), and in a small number of Crimson Canyon NUC devices. Intel advises parties interested in its Crimson Canyon NUC SFF PCs to make their final orders by December 27, 2019, or return them by that date. The f
Read more

Qualcomm Launches the QCA6390 Chipset: 1.8 Gbps Wi-Fi 6 Ready with BlueTooth 5.1

Image
With the upcoming ratification of the Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) standard expected in August, a number of companies are gearing up with Wi-Fi 6 ‘ready’ routers and end-points to get the jump on the market. The idea is that the standard won’t change much between now and full ratification, and most companies developing chipsets expect to sail through without issues – the only difference between the companies will be on the ‘optional’ portions of the specifciations. With that, as we saw at Qualcomm’s Tech Day at the end of 2018, the company will be pushing its latest Wi-Fi 6 solutions onto the market. Today is the launch of one of the chipsets, the QCA6390, which also incorporates BlueTooth 5.1.
Read more