Fadu’s FC5161 SSD Controller Breaks Cowl in Western Digital’s PCIe Gen5 Enterprise Drives

When Western Digital launched its Ultrastar DC SN861 SSDs earlier this yr, the corporate didn’t disclose which controller it used for these drives, which made many observers presume that WD was utilizing an in-house controller. However a current teardown of the drive exhibits that isn’t the case; as an alternative, the corporate is utilizing a controller from Fadu, a South Korean firm based in 2015 that specializes on enterprise-grade turnkey SSD options.

The Western Digital Ultrastar DC SN861 SSD is geared toward performance-hungry hyperscale datacenters and enterprise clients that are adopting PCIe Gen5 storage units today. And, as uncovered in pictures from a recent Storage Review article, the drive is predicated on Fadu’s FC5161 NVMe 2.0-compliant controller. The FC5161 makes use of 16 NAND channels supporting an ONFi 5.0 2400 MT/s interface, and contains a mixture of enterprise-grade capabilities (OCP Cloud Spec 2.0, SR-IOV, as much as 512 identify areas for ZNS assist, versatile knowledge placement, NVMe-MI 1.2, superior safety, telemetry, energy loss safety) not accessible on different off-the-shelf controllers – or on any earlier Western Digital controllers.  

The Ultrastar DC SN861 SSD gives sequential learn speeds as much as 13.7 GB/s in addition to sequential write speeds as much as 7.5 GB/s. As for random efficiency, it boasts with an as much as 3.3 million random 4K learn IOPS and as much as 0.8 million random 4K write IOPS. The drives can be found in capacities between 1.6 TB and seven.68 TB with one or three drive writes per day (DWPD) over 5 years score in addition to in U.2 and E1.S form-factors. 

Whereas the 2 type elements of the SN861 share the same technical design, Western Digital has tailor-made every model for distinct workloads: the E1.S helps FDP and efficiency enhancements particularly for cloud environments. In contrast, the U.2 mannequin is geared in direction of high-performance enterprise duties and rising purposes like AI.

With none doubts, Western Digital’s Ultrastar DC SN861 is a feature-rich high-performance enterprise-grade SSD. It has one other distinctive characteristic: a 5W idle energy consumption, which is slightly low by the requirements of enterprise-grade drives (e.g., it’s 1W decrease in comparison with the SN840). Whereas the distinction with predecessors could also be simply 1W, hyperscalers deploy 1000’s of drives and for his or her TCO each watt counts.

Western Digital’s Ultrastar DC SN861 SSDs at the moment are accessible for buy to pick clients (similar to Meta) and to events. Costs are unknown, however they may rely upon such elements as volumes.

Sources: Fadu, Storage Review