WD is blending flash memory and hard drives.
WD is blending flash memory and hard drives.
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WD mingles flash memory and hard drive in a single storage device

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 4 min

Western Digital (WD) has announced a new architecture that will combine the speed of flash memory chips and the density of hard disk drives into a single product for enterprises and consumers.

The OptiNAND technology integrates hard disk drives (HDD) with iNAND flash memory chips. WD said this will give customers on both the enterprise side and the consumer side the ability to store vast amounts more data in a bid to keep up with the exponential growth of data in the coming years. WD announced the innovations that it said break the barriers of traditional storage at its online event today.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.