After the company bought Siliconsystems Inc. in mid-2009, it indicated an interest in expanding its traditional disk drive industry into the solid-state storage market, giving it the means to form the WD Solid-State Storage Business.

In May 2013, the company released its first solid-state hybrid drive, the WD Black SSHD, featuring NAND flash from SanDisk between 8GB and 24GB in capacity, with performance up to 450MB/s reads and 350MB/s writes. The drive also offered a SATA III 6Gbps interface for storage, using firmware to determine caching to the solid-state storage module.

After announcing its plans to acquire SanDisk last fall and completing the acquisition for $19 billion earlier this year, the company is now ready to introduce its first self-branded solid state disks to consumers based on the SATA interface in 2.5-inch and M.2 2280 form factors.

WD Blue and Green

The company is releasing two lineups for its first self-branded SSDs, WD Blue and WD Green. The WD Blue series drives are optimized for multitasking performance and resource-heavy applications, offering up to 545MB/s reads and 525MB/s writes with up to 400TBW endurance. On the other hand, WD Green series drives are more power-efficient and feature up to 540MB/s sequential reads and 405MB/s sequential writes with up to 80TBW endurance.



The WD Blue series is available in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities and in both 2.5-inch and M.2 2280 form factors, with suggested retail prices of $79, $139 and $299, respectively. Meanwhile, the WD Green series is available in 120GB and 240GB capacities also in both 2.5-inch and M.2 2280 form factors, with prices yet to be announced. The WD Blue series is now shipping, while the company has said WD Green will become available sometime later this quarter.