

As a series ATA-based drive, it wo n’t be going neck and neck with PCI Express-bus, NVMe-equipped options such as the roaringly fast Samsung SSD 950 Pro. While the WD Blue SSDs are the rapid of the company ‘s two raw SSD sets, the company did n’t design it to blow away benchmarks. And with SanDisk now a subordinate of WD, they about surely wo n’t be the last. These two drives are the first proper client- and consumer-focused SSDs to come from westerly Digital. The WD Green SSD is more of a budget-oriented line that will be aimed at the low-cost OEM and entry-level commercialize, for those upgraders who just want a solid surrogate for a spinning-platter hard drive at a low price. ) well, the WD Blue SSD that we ‘re looking at here is the foremost of a pair of families of new WD-branded SSDs, and the more performance-oriented of the two. Since 1982, PCMag has tested and rated thousands of products to help you make better buy decisions. But that was back in 2014, and since the company finalized its acquisition of SanDisk earlier in 2016, those who follow the storage space have been wondering when we ‘d see the first SSDs to result from the combination of the two companies. western Digital has dabbled in solid-state memory a piece before, most notably with its WD Black2 Dual Drive, which managed to jam both an SSD and a hard drive into the shell of a typical 2.5-inch drive. So it was unsurprising, then, that western Digital bought SanDisk, a major flash-storage maker ( and SSD heavyweight ) toward the end of 2015. indeed, as AnandTech noted earlier in 2016, hard drive shipments, in fact, fell 17 percentage in 2015. SSDs supply much faster throughput, and bantam form factors like M.2 for ever-thinner laptops and convertibles like Asus ‘ holocene superslim ZenBook 3. īetween the switch to cloud-based memory and the rapid adoption of solid-state drives ( SSDs ), spinning-platter storage does n’t look like a major growth market down the trace. But every company needs to look to the future, and the future of of hard drives, at least on the consumer presence, does n’t look all that shiny. As one of the few remaining giants of the hard drive space ( aboard Seagate and Toshiba ), westerly Digital ( WD ) ships enough of drives, both in pre-built laptops and desktops, and as plain drives for everything from servers to DIY system builds.
