At the end of 2023, data storage company Western Digital announced plans to split itself into two companies. One of them, which will continue to be called Western Digital, will focus on spinning hard drives, which are no longer used in consumer systems but remain important for NAS devices and data centers. The other, called SanDisk, will work with solid-state drives, including drives that Western Digital sold to consumers under the Blue, Black, Green and Red brands.
This split effectively undoes what Western Digital did a decade ago. when it bought SanDisk for $19 billion. And we are only now beginning to understand how the separation will affect the company's existing consumer preferences.
Today SanDisk announced that the mainstream WD Blue and WD Black SSDs will be discontinued and replaced by SanDisk Optimus branded drives with the same model numbers.
WD Blue drives will now be called SanDisk Optimus, starting with the Optimus 5100, a rebadged version of the WD Blue SN5100. The mid-range WD Black drives will be branded as SanDisk's Optimus GX, with the Optimus GX 7100 replacing the WD Black SN7100. And the high-performance WD Black drives will become the SanDisk Optimus GX Pro SSDs, with the Optimus GX Pro 850X and 8100 replacing the WD Black SN850X and 8100 drives.
Given that these are all fast NVMe SSDs, I suspect the average user will be hard-pressed to detect much difference between the entry-level WD Blue/Optimus drives and the high-end WD Black/Optimus GX Pro SSDs. But the functional differences between the drives remain the same as before: the Blue/Optimus 5100 uses slightly slower and less durable quad-cell (QLC) flash memory, and the Black/Optimus GX 7100 uses triple-cell (TLC) flash memory. The Black/Optimus GX Pro 8100 maximizes performance by using a PCIe 5.0 interface instead of PCIe 4.0 and incorporating a dedicated DRAM cache (the 5100 and 7100 each require a small portion of your system's RAM, called a host memory buffer, or HMB, to do so). The 850X is a slightly older drive that retains dedicated DRAM, but is also limited to PCIe 4.0 speeds.
