Western Digital goes for performance and sustainability with new solid state drives

Western Digital has gone both blue and green. The maker of hard drives and storage devices has a new line of high-capacity solid state drives (SSDs) that emphasize either the high-performance or the “green” nature of the sustainable power consumption levels.

In WD’s parlance, blue means fast. Green means environmentally friendly. And today, the company is introducing a new generation of its new WD-branded SATA client SSDs that complement the hard drives for PCs and workstations that are part of its traditional business. WD acquired SanDisk, a maker of flash memory-based SSDs, for $19 billion in 2015.

Above: WD Green SSDs have a low-power footprint.

Image Credit: WD

Irvine, California-based WD positions the SSDs as the ultimate solution for do-it-yourself PCs, extending the life of a current PC with capacities that can reach as high as one terabyte. Consumers such as DIY fans, PC enthusiasts, gamers, and content creators are the target market.

WD says the new drives are reliable and have quick boot times and increased program responsiveness. Consumers benefit from the combination of reliable storage with an industry-leading 1.75M hours MTTF, coupled with reduced power and less heat when compared to HDDs.

Both the blue and green SSDs include free, downloadable WD SSD Dashboard software, which allows continuous performance and capacity monitoring. The devices are ultra-thin, they’re speedy at video transfer, and the dashboard is quite easy to monitor.

Above: The WD Blue dashboard.

Image Credit: WD

“Consumers who are familiar with the WD brand now have a flat solution to go with the hard-disk drive portfolio,” said Eyal Bek, senior director for client product marketing at WD, in an interview with VentureBeat. “With WD Blue, we turn the knob on performance. If consumers pick the blue one, they know what they’re getting. With green, they also can understand it easily as having a lower power footprint. We think these colors will resonate.”

The WD Blue comes in capacities of 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB, and in both 2.5-inch/7mm case or M.2 2280 form factors. The WD Blue SSD offers up to 545MBps and 525MBps sequential read and write speeds, and endurance up to 400 TBW. The price ranges from $80 to $300.

The WD Green SSDs are available in 120GB and 240GB capacities, and in both 2.5-inch/7mm case or M.2 2280 form factors. The WD Green SSDs deliver an ultra-low power draw, enabling PC users to work longer between battery charges. WD Green features sequential read and write times of up to 540MBps and 405MBps and endurance up to 80TBW. WD Green SSDs will be available later this quarter to select regions and customers.

Disclosure: WD sent me a WD Blue drive for review purposes. Our coverage remains objective.