Western Digital introduced four new data storage products on Wednesday for use in industrial and smart manufacturing where there might be multiple thousands of IoT devices in a single facility.
The new products provide high-endurance, low power 3D NAND to give flexibility to systems designers of edge gateways, robotics and AI applications, the company said.
One of the new products is the company’s first 3D NAND embedded MultiMedia Card (e.MMC) built with 64-layer 3D NAND technology for IoT. It is called the iNAND IX EM132 EFD and comes in two flavors up to 256 GB. It operates at -25 degrees C. to 85 degrees C. The company suggested it could be used in advanced health monitoring, thermal management, power management and high-level data retention.
Two new SD and microSD cards were also announced for industrial and IoT markets. Both the IX LD342 SD and the IX QD342 microSD cards use 3D NAND and offer 16 GB to 512 GB of capacity with a long program/erase lifecycle of 3,000 P/Es.
The cards are the highest capacity industrial devices of their type, the company said.
Part of the value of having high-capacity cards for various IoT devices at a manufacturing facility is to be able to collect the massive amounts of data that are being generated for follow-up analysis. Without such storage, the data might normally be discarded.
“People in industrial settings might not know what to do with all the data, and discarding it means you don’t get the value out of the data,” said Sam Yu, director of technical product marketing for automotive, mobile and embedded devices.
Pricing for the new products hasn’t been announced.