Western Digital launches SSD products

Martin Brinkmann
Oct 12, 2016
Hardware
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10

Western Digital launched two new Solid State Drives (SSD) product lines under the WD brand yesterday of which one is already available for purchase.

WD Blue and WD Green Solid State Drives are the company's first WD-branded SATA SSDs. The flash memory comes from SanDisk, the world's third-largest manufacturer of flash memory which Western Digital acquired earlier this year.

The main distinction between WD Blue and Green is the following one: WD Blue is designed for professional use, WD Green for regular use.

WD Blue drives are already available, while WD Green drives will become available later this quarter.

Side note: Western Digital launched consumer Solid State Drives back in 2010 under the SiliconEdge brand.

WD Blue SSD

western digitial ssd

WD Blue Solid State Drives are offered as 2.5" and M.2 modules with capacities of 250 Gigabyte to 1 Terabyte.

The two larger models, 1TB and 500GB offer identical performance specifications. They connect via SATA III 6 GB/s interfaces, and offer up to 545MB/s read and 525 MB/s write speeds. The random read (IOPS) is up to 100k, the random write (IOPS) uz to 80k.

The 250 Gigabyte model is slightly slower with 540 MB/s read, 500 MB/s write, 97K random read and 79K random write performance.

The drives differ significantly when it comes to endurance. Endurance determines the total amount of data that can be written on the devices.

The 1TB WD Blue model offers 400 Terabytes of writes, the 500 Gigabyte model 200 Terabytes, and the 250 Gigabyte model 100 Terabytes.

For comparison's sake: Samsung's EVO 850 Pro offers 150 TB on the 128GB, 256GB and 512GB models, and 300 TB on the 1TB and 2TB models.

The 250 GB 2.5" WD Blue SSD retails for $79, the 500 GB model for $139.99, and the 1TB model for $299.99. The M.2 versions for $89.99, $159.99 and $319.99 respectively.

This falls in line with Samsung's EVO 850 which costs about the same for the same amount of storage.

WD Green SSD

WD Green Solid State drives come with capacities of 120GB and 240, and as 2.5" or M.2 modules.

Sequential read speed is up to 540MB/s on both drives, write speed on the 240GB model up to 465 MB/s, on the 120GB model up to 430 MB/s.

The random read speed is up to 37k IOPS, the random write speed up to 68K IOPS on the 240GB drive, and up to 65K IOPS on the 120GB drive.

Endurance-wise, the 240GB model is good for 80TB of total data, the 120GB for 40TB. Pricing has not been announced yet for WD Green SSDs.

Closing Words

Third-party benchmark tests are not available yet. You may want to wait with the purchase until those become available.

It is unclear yet if Western Digital will create a WD Black SSD in the future as well. WD Black drives are designed for performance.

Now You: SSD or platter-based hard drive, which do you prefer?

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Western Digital launches SSD products
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Western Digital launches SSD products
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Western Digital launched two new Solid State Drives (SSD) product lines under the WD brand yesterday of which one is already available for purchase.
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Ghacks Technology News
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Comments

  1. Sally said on October 17, 2016 at 2:11 am
    Reply

    Wish they would show the M.2 Read/Write speed, normal SSD is already like last gen.

  2. Jimmy James said on October 13, 2016 at 6:55 am
    Reply

    I saw WD just bought out new blue SSD drives too. I have always liked WD drives, would be nice to see them shake up the SSD market.

  3. D. said on October 13, 2016 at 1:16 am
    Reply

    @ Martin Brinkmann

    You know what I think is interesting nobody ever seems to question Trimm. Is it doing what it should be doing and how do you know? If it stops working how do you know. If you have a power surge can you lose Trimm with out knowing it.

    To me Trimm is your privacy and security by the way it works. I guess people are just taking it for granted that it is working and doing what it is supposed to do. At least with CCleaner or some other cleaner I can initiate that (not on a ssd on over writing) but with Trimm I don’t know.. Maybe Trimm is better.You and I talked about this a little before as for as over writing.

    At this time this computer is a little over a year old so more than likely I will wait on using a SSD. I like the speed of a SSD but I’m OK with this platter-based hard drive as you say. My speed is not that bad at this time.

  4. mikef90000 said on October 12, 2016 at 11:05 pm
    Reply

    On one hand, it’s good to see another option in the fairly immature SSD marketplace.

    It also looks like WD marketing folks don’t talk to each other. The ‘black’ HDD drives are for enterprise use, the blue drives for desktop use and the green drives are ‘eco friendly’ meaning they power down at the worst moment. So much for branding consistency.

    The primary rule of thumb with using SSD drives is Do Not use multiple drives from the same batch in the same RAID array – they will wear out at about the same time. Other than that, backup, backup, backup. I don’t trust them yet for critical data storage, but they’re fine for system partitions. My recent WD hard drives are holding up better than Seagate, go figure.

    1. mikef90000 said on October 13, 2016 at 12:52 am
      Reply

      BRAIN CRAMP CORRECTION – mentally delete the paragraph about branding. Arrggh.

  5. Dave P. said on October 12, 2016 at 8:15 pm
    Reply

    Well, I hope they fare better than the mechanical WD drives I’ve had in the past. An external one failed prematurely due to the interface electronics dying. Dismantled it on a hunch to check and installed the drive itself in an external caddy and it lasted only about a year, as did another one installed internally. I currently have another external one (disguised as another brand – wouldn’t have bought it had I known) running way too hot, for some reason, so I’m afraid I won’t be purchasing further WD gear. I get the impression from comments made elsewhere that the overall reliability of WD drives is not too good.

  6. Joe said on October 12, 2016 at 1:09 pm
    Reply

    The durability ratings of the WD drives only differ in one sense – each rating is based on the entire drive being written 400 times. It’s worth keeping in mind, however, that these are fairly meaningless, low-end estimates, the minimum amounts that the manufacturer is willing to guarantee. The actual lifespans of the drives will probably be much longer: http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead

  7. fena said on October 12, 2016 at 7:24 am
    Reply

    prices quoted in what currency/country? NZ Dollar ?

    1. Anonymous said on October 12, 2016 at 10:16 am
      Reply

      Why would you think it’s in kiwi dollars?

    2. Martin Brinkmann said on October 12, 2016 at 7:36 am
      Reply

      US Dollar.

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