NAB 2024 Tech Talk: Western Digital's Christina Garza Talks High-Capacity Storage

In this interview from the Western Digital booth at NAB 2024, I spoke with Western Digital Director of Product Marketing Christina Garza about WD's latest high-capacity SanDisk SDXC cards and 24TB hard drives.

Marc Franklin: I am here at the Western Digital booth at NAB 2024 visiting with Christina Garza, Director of Product Marketing. We're going to talk about some of their new high-capacity SD cards that--depending on what you're recording--you could probably use to record for days on a single card.

Christina Garza: Yeah, that's the goal: meeting the demands that people have now of higher resolution, higher imaging, longer periods of time that you can do recording, which means less downtime, switching out cards, and things like that. So we're really trying to accommodate what the market is telling us that they need.

Marc Franklin: The report on the 256 GB card that's in my camera right now is that if I put it in my camera in HD mode, I get something like 11 hours. So this new 4TB would literally be days of recording time in 1080 at 45 megabits per second. I guess if you have to do something where you're doing surveillance or a documentary out in nature, that'll be the card to go to, right?

Christina Garza: Yes. Any time you need to record longer, you don't want to have any thought switching up cards to keep track of it. That's the goal. So we are introducing the SanDisk Extreme PRO line of UHS-I cards and we have a 4TB, as you said. Now, using the new SDUC standard to get to that, we also have two other new cards that we're introducing. It's 2TB using the SDXC cards, our Extreme PRO SD card, again, UHS-I. And then we also have the world's fastest 2TB SD UHS one as well. So again, really accommodating users with the capacity that the market is demanding.

Marc Franklin: What other products do you have for us here at NAB?

Christina Garza: So another really exciting technology we are announcing and we just announced last week, is the new SD Express cards. So we have an SD Express SD card as well as a microSD card. But, leveraging all of this new standard technology coming from the SD Association and those SD Express cards are incredibly exciting because they take even our fastest current cards four times faster. And so just really, again, enabling speed, enabling the format, we know with things like AI coming very quickly, we're going to be able to enable 3D renders editing, capturing footage on this fly, doing everything so much quicker with this new SD Express technology. Very excited about that.

Marc Franklin: Elsewhere in the Western digital booth, we're going to take a look at some of the storage solutions for post-production. So we're going to look at these. Looks like some new G-RAIDs. So tell me what we have here.

Speaker 3: Really excited about announcing the availability of the 24 TB drives. In the SanDisk Professional line, we have a variety of different products. We have a single-drive solution, and a dual-drives version and the which GWA shop. AI allows you to store a lot more. With these drives you get very, very high performance. This RAID has 8 drives. You can get all the way up to 1700 megabytes per second part out of the box. So it's really important power. They're useful for if you're dealing 4K, 6K workflows, that performance and capacity is really going to help you. But you also have these configurations in single drive and dual drive based on what you need as part of what you're doing.

This one G Drive is USB-C simple, but anything beyond that is all Thunderbolt 3-enabled. So you can daisy chain, it's a professional connector so it's very reliable and you get that faster performance out of that.

Marc Franklin: And when are these going to be available?

Speaker 3: These are shipping products, but in terms of the 24 TB capacities, they will be available very, very soon in the next couple of months.

Marc Franklin: What is the top throughput on these guys?

Speaker 3: This one, in a RAID0, if you want to get full capacity, it can go all the way up to 2100 megabytes per second, but it ships in a RAID5 configuration where there is one-drive redundancy. It's very important when you're dealing with so much data. So that can go up to 1700 megabytes per second--1690 to be exact. This one is a four-bay. It ships in a RAID5 configuration, so you can get up to 700 megabytes per second in this configuration. The dual-bay can go up to 500 in a RAID0, but it ships in a RAID1, so there's redundancy. So you get up to 250 megabytes per second and then the same performance you get out of the G Drive prduct as well.

Marc Franklin: Looks like there's going to be a lot of storage available for the new resolutions that are coming out. We've had 6K and now a lot of people are doing 8K and 12K and I heard Blackmagic is even doing a 17K camera. So hopefully drives like these will keep people in business.