New Western Digital SSDs Offer More Capacity And Speed

Western Digital today announced the launch of two new SSD lineups. It’s not surprising even though Western Digital is best known for its hard drives. That’s because the company acquired SanDisk for $19 billion last year, and SanDisk has quite a lot of experience in making SSDs. The two lineups are branded under Western Digital and SanDisk each and are the first SSDs to be based on SanDisk’s 64 layer 3D NAND chips.

These chips enable Western Digital to deliver new SSDS with increased capacity, lower power consumption, and greater speeds. These SSDs are targeted towards DIY enthusiasts, system builders, and resellers.

The two lineups, Western Digital Blue and SanDisk Ultra 3D, are similar when it comes to capacity. They also use the same controllers and thus have similar performance numbers. It’s pertinent to note that the WD Blue offers a M.2 2280 device which the SanDisk SSD doesn’t.

Both SSD lineups will be available in 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities in conventional 2.5 inch cased drives. Both promise up to 560MB and 530MB of sequential read and write speeds respectively.

Prices for the SSDs start at $99 for the 250GB model and go up from there. The SSDs will come with a 3 year limited warranty and they will be available for purchase globally in the third quarter of this year.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Computers
Tags: computex, Computex 2017, sandisk, ssd, western digital