Western Digital WD Blue PC SSD (250GB)
Positive progress for an old platform.
For almost a decade, we’ve been asking, “When will Western Digital get into the SSD market?” and this question was answered in May, 2016, when WD completed its acquisition of SanDisk. This action not only strengthened WD as a storage heavyweight within the market but accelerated the company’s push into the memory storage sector by giving it direct access to all that SanDisk has to offer — knowledge, manufacturing capability, the lot.
The first WD SSDs are effectively rebadged updates of current SanDisk technologies with WD branding applied. The SanDisk Ultra II (back over the page) and WD Blue drives look identical, bar the stickers. However, there is a key difference — the updated memory, controller and firmware integrated into the WD products.
In our tests, this resulted in the WD Blue returning higher write results; however, interestingly, it didn’t feature the same read spike in the 4K Q64 AS SSD read test.