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Fadu's FC5161 SSD Controller Breaks Cover in Western Digital's PCIe Gen5 Enterprise Drives
by Anton Shilov on August 15, 2024 6:15 PM EST - Posted in - Storage - SSDs - Western Digital - Ultrastar - FADU 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. 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. 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.
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