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Western Digital has been well known for its hard drives for years now but this year, the company is stepping into the SSD arena. Following on from WD's acquisition of SanDisk, the company has launched new Green and Blue series solid state drives in 2.5-inch and M.2 form.
Blue and Green drives have been a part of Western Digital's arsenal for a while now, with Green HDD's traditionally being geared towards energy efficiency and Blue HDD's offering performance on a budget. The SSD counterparts for these drives are very similar in that regard.
Western Digital's Blue SSDs come in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities with sequential read speeds of 545 MB/s and write speeds up to 525 MB/s. The Blue drives are also built for endurance, with the 250GB model rated for up to 100 terabytes written, the 500GB model bumps that up to 200 terabytes and the 1TB SSD can be over written more then 400 times. Blue SSDs start at $80 for the 250GB, $140 for the 500GB and $300 for the 1TB.
The Green drives sacrifice some performance for energy efficiency. These models are available in smaller 120GB and 240GB capacities with 540 MB/s read speeds and 405 MB/s write speeds. As far as endurance goes, the 240GB Green is rated for 80 TBW while the 120GB one is rated for around 40 TBW.
KitGuru Says: Now that Western Digital has access to SanDisk's SSD expertise, it will be interesting to see how these new drives perform. How many of you guys own a Western Digital hard drive? Would you switch to a WD SSD?
Not sure why you’d buy an M.2 SSD that can only do SATAIII speeds
WD HDD have a great reputation so I can see their SSDs doing very well. It also makes builds easier if you just tell someone to go with WD for SSDs and a HDD rather than mixing and matching.
OK, now that sindisk and WD are the same company, let’s see WD produce professional SSD’s Sandisk produce the X400 series for datacentres besides other varients, however, if you’re producing M2 series SSD’s then the speeds will have to be higher than that of traditional SATA 3 spec, just not good enough. if you’re working with media all the time, sample libraries, recording large multi-track sessions, etc, SSD’s the way to go but you need real performance, not the kind of rubbish the likes of crucial are now churning out. years ago I used to recommend and install crucial SSD’s in protools environments. NEVER AGAIN. so, come on WD don’t let me down. I really do think though that producing WD Green SSD’s doesn’t make sense, you’re sacrificing data handling and speeds, it’s not worth it. concentrate on blue and BLACK or even RED versions for 24/7 usage.