Technician 3 - Test Equipment Maintenance

Western Digital shares have fallen 34.5% since July 22, 2026, while the S&P 500 gained 3.1%. The stock dropped 13% on August 6 after its gross margin forecast for fiscal Q1 2027 missed expectations set by rival Seagate. In past market shocks, the stock fell 34.8% on average, more than twice the S&P 500's 15.8% drop. It lost 68% in the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Recovery took a median of 8.7 months. The business itself is stronger. Revenue reached $12.9 billion over the four quarters ended July 3, 2026, up 35.7%, with an operating margin of 35.6%. Debt fell to $1.05 billion from $7.43 billion two years earlier. Exabyte shipments grew 22% in fiscal Q4 2026, below the 25% rise for the full year. Management guided to a gross margin of 55% to 56%, just above the prior quarter's 54.4%.

Tokenized stock trading is growing overseas while major US companies resist it at home, according to Bitwise Asset Management's latest quarterly report. On Robinhood Chain, tokenized stock volume rose from $526 million in July to $2.21 billion in August, then to $11.31 billion in September. Tokenized equities were also the fastest-growing category on Solana. Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Caterpillar, McDonald's, Western Digital, and Alphabet have objected to tokenized versions of their shares trading on OKXICE, a venue launched by crypto exchange OKX and Intercontinental Exchange. Sixteen companies have now objected. The US Securities and Exchange Commission's innovation exemption lets companies opt out. OKXICE co-chairman Andrew Cuomo said many companies would "wait and see" before taking part.

WD Black SN7100 1 TB review. It's absolutely wild just how fast NAND prices have fallen over these last few years. It's one of the few areas in the PC gaming space where the tech development and cost seem to be continually improving year-on-year. Yet, Interestingly, it's the PCIe 4.0 arena that's getting the most love and attention, despite 5.0 SSDs leading the way in terms of sequential performance. In fact, arguably, some of the best SSDs for gaming right now are 4.0 drives. They're cheaper, cooler, and perform just as well as their high-speed sequential counterparts. PreorderGames Discover more Read Daily News Try New Games Western Digital's latest WD Black SN7100 is a fine example of that exact ethos. It is, on the surface, a simple enough drive. It's PCIe 4.0, it has Kioxia 218-layer BiCS8 TLC NAND, and the company's Sandisk Polaris 3 A101 controller (the same found in the WD Blue SN5000 I reviewed late last year). Following on with modern trends, WD's also dropped the dedicated DRAM cache (honestly, you really don't need it anymore) and gone for a single-sided drive design, making it far more compatible with the likes of laptops, motherboards, consoles, and smaller form factor systems. Nothing new here then, just a well-known manufacturer quietly releasing a solid storage solution that's following market trends. Well, not quite, and the confusion lies in how this thing is positioned in WD's arsenal. The SN7100 is available from 500 GB all the way up to 2 TB configurations, all of which are heatsinkless. There are some mutterings of a 4 TB config, but it's not available just yet. They're aggressively priced too, ranging from $60 to $140. The problem, however, arises when you look at the wider product stack from WD, namely the SN850X line. WD Black SN7100 specs Capacity: 1 TB Interface: PCIe 4.0 x4 Memory controller: Sandisk Polaris 3 A101-000172-A1 Flash memory: Kioxia 218-Layer BiCS8 TLC NAND Rated performance: 7,250 MB/s sustained read, 6,900 MB/s sustained write Endurance: 600 TBW Warranty: Five years Price: $85 | £74 Now admittedly, there are some major differences here. The SN850X starts at 1 TB capacities, and goes all the way up to 8 TB (with the 8 TB SN850X being a different design with denser 162-layer BiCS6 TLC NAND compared to the first gen), but the thing is, pricing for the non-heatsinked versions are pretty much identical. That's a big problem too, because the performance differences between them are, well, fairly negligible. These are two wildly different SSDs as well. The SN850X isn't a single-sided design; it has far less-dense TLC NAND, comes with a DRAM cache, and a Triton MP16+ B2 controller to take advantage of that. It's also three years old, in its non-8 TB form. So Arcader has got two SSDs, from the same company, that, on the surface, are available at similar capacities, at identical prices, that perform almost exactly the same, bar some outlying test results here and there. But a time gap of three years. Right. Before I get onto why that is, let's go over the performance figures. The great news is that the SN7100 seriously shines and that Kioxia 218-layer isn't holding back. Particularly in productivity work. In my testing, it delivered some top-tier numbers in CrystalDiskMark, landing an average score of 7,116 MB/s on the read and 6,820 MB/s on the write. For contrast, the SN850X (admittedly its 8TB variant) scored 7,100 MB/s and 6,590 MB/s on the write, only slightly behind there. Discover more Video Games Random 4K performance for the SN7100 was a bit of an intriguing one too. It absolutely demolished every drive I've tested on the read front, scoring an insane 101 MB/s. For context, the second fastest drive I've had on test, Crucial's PCIe 5.0 2 TB T700, only managed 81 MB/s there. It does, however, fall quite short on the write portion of that benchmark, landing just 276 MB/s. With even the SN850X beating it by a healthy margin of 22 MB/s too. PC Gamer test bench CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9900X | RAM: 64 GB (2x32GB) Team Group T-Create Expert DDR5 @ 6000 C34 | GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super | Motherboard: Asus ROG Strix X870E-E Gaming WiFi | CPU Cooler: Asus ROG Ryujin III 360 ARGB Extreme | PSU: 1200W NZXT C1200 (2024) 80+ Gold | Chassis: Geometric Future Model 5 You're after top-tier gaming performance: With high random 4K read speeds and a cool design, the SN7100 does double duty as brilliant for both consoles and gaming PCs a like. Don't buy if... You have an SN850X already: Aside from some efficiency improvements and improvements on random 4K reads, you're not likely going to see any major benefit shifting away from an already solid PCIe 4.0 SSD. Similarly, scores across 3DMark's Storage test produced respectable numbers as well. Although again closely tied with the SN850X. Final Fantasy also landed in a smooth 7.841 seconds, making it faster than Samsung's 990 Evo Plus, but barely. It does also seem that those games do prefer to have access to DRAM cache to load those scenarios, although the likelihood of actually noticing the difference between 7.8 and 7.3 second total load times over five separate scenes in real life is admittedly slim. The big win was on temps. Under my Asus ROG Strix X870E-E motherboard's heatsink, the SN7100 topped out at an impressively low 48 C throughout the benchmark run. That's again one of the best temperatures I've seen for some time, with the only drive that arguably tops it, in terms of "wow, that's impressive," being Corsair's MP700 Elite PCIe 5.0 SSD, with its staggering 55 C (although interestingly they both use the same Kioxia 218-layer TLC NAND). So then, given the SN850X exists and has done for three years, why on earth release the SN7100? Aside from the single-sided design. Well, admittedly, this is purely speculation on my part, but I'd wager it's all to do with cost. But not for the consumer. By removing the DDR4 DRAM cache, simplifying the design so its single-sided, and using denser NAND (that allows you to reduce the number of chiplets on the SSD itself), WD effectively makes this drive far cheaper to manufacture from a purely business perspective. That is fair enough; that's how tech advances. But what annoys me about that is the fact it isn't cheaper for the consumer. As mentioned, the SN7100 is the same cost as that aging SN850X, when in reality it should be cheaper. Not by a lot admittedly, but by something at the very least, and it's not. It's likely the SN850X is no longer in production at this point, and that warehouse stock is all that's left. With it slowly being phased out in favor of the SN7100, and that moniker reserved for an upcoming PCIe 5.0 or 6.0 drive. But, still, it would have been nice to see a price drop. Look, the SN7100 delivers on two critical, key areas. Random read performance (a signature metric Arcader use for determining game load times) and temperature, which in a world of toasty, power hungry, RTX 5090s, and super hot CPUs is no bad thing. If you're looking for a solid and dependable PCIe 4.0 SSD that won't break the bank, the SN7100 is a fine place to start.