Feed: AnandTech
Feed Link: https://www.anandtech.com
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Title: Fadu's FC5161 SSD Controller Breaks Cover in Western Digital's PCIe
Gen5 Enterprise Drives

Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2024 18:15:00 EDT
Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21532/western-...

When Western Digital introduced its Ultrastar DC SN861 SSDs earlier this
year, the company did not disclose which controller it used for these drives,
which made many observers presume that WD was using an in-house controller.
But a recent teardown of the drive shows that is not the case; instead, the
company is using a controller from Fadu, a South Korean company founded in
2015 that specializes on enterprise-grade turnkey SSD solutions.

The Western Digital Ultrastar DC SN861 SSD is aimed at performance-hungry
hyperscale datacenters and enterprise customers which are adopting PCIe Gen5
storage devices these days. And, as uncovered in photos from a recent Storage
Review article, the drive is based on Fadu's FC5161 NVMe 2.0-compliant
controller. The FC5161 utilizes 16 NAND channels supporting an ONFi 5.0 2400
MT/s interface, and features a combination of enterprise-grade capabilities
(OCP Cloud Spec 2.0, SR-IOV, up to 512 name spaces for ZNS support, flexible
data placement, NVMe-MI 1.2, advanced security, telemetry, power loss
protection) not available on other off-the-shelf controllers - or on any
previous Western Digital controllers.

The Ultrastar DC SN861 SSD offers sequential read speeds up to 13.7 GB/s as
well as sequential write speeds up to 7.5 GB/s. As for random performance, it
boasts with an up to 3.3 million random 4K read IOPS and up to 0.8 million
random 4K write IOPS. The drives are available in capacities between 1.6 TB
and 7.68 TB with one or three drive writes per day (DWPD) over five years
rating as well as in U.2 and E1.S form-factors.

While the two form factors of the SN861 share a similar technical design,
Western Digital has tailored each version for distinct workloads: the E1.S
supports FDP and performance enhancements specifically for cloud
environments. By contrast, the U.2 model is geared towards high-performance
enterprise tasks and emerging applications like AI.

Without any doubts, Western Digital's Ultrastar DC SN861 is a feature-rich
high-performance enterprise-grade SSD. It has another distinctive feature: a
5W idle power consumption, which is rather low by the standards of enterprise-
grade drives (e.g., it is 1W lower compared to the SN840). While the
difference with predecessors may be just 1W, hyperscalers deploy thousands of
drives and for their TCO every watt counts.

Western Digital's Ultrastar DC SN861 SSDs are now available for purchase to
select customers (such as Meta) and to interested parties. Prices are
unknown, but they will depend on such factors as volumes.

Sources: Fadu, Storage Review

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