![]() It is possible that more SSD products may be announced at CES in just a few months or even Computex in the summer, but this will depend on company strategy, reaching the right price-to-performance targets, and meeting any related NAND flash supply levels going forward. The prospects for additional WD-branded flash memory products will result from the initial market response and sales numbers moving into the next several quarters. The WD Blue and WD Green are the company’s first SSD products since it acquired SanDisk, and as such it has not made any announcements yet for the other segments. The packaging also classifies the company’s storage products into four segments – WD Blue for mainstream PCs, WD Black for performance PCs, WD Red for NAS devices, and WD Purple for surveillance. The WD Blue 1TB 2.5-inch SATA III solid state disk provided by Western Digital comes with white and blue packaging that shows drive size and warranty information on the front, and model number and form factor on the back. According to the company’s product manual, these drives are designed for high endurance scenarios with heavy workloads ranging between 40GB and 80GB per day of written data. This review focuses on the WD Blue, including listed features, performance specifications and benchmarks. The WD Blue series is now shipping, while the company has said WD Green will become available sometime later this quarter. Meanwhile, the WD Green series is available in 120GB and 240GB capacities also in both 2.5-inch and M.2 2280 form factors, with prices yet to be announced. The WD Blue series is available in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities and in both 2.5-inch and M.2 2280 form factors, with suggested retail prices of $79, $139 and $299, respectively. ![]() On the other hand, WD Green series drives are more power-efficient and feature up to 540MB/s sequential reads and 405MB/s sequential writes with up to 80TBW endurance. The WD Blue series drives are optimized for multitasking performance and resource-heavy applications, offering up to 545MB/s reads and 525MB/s writes with up to 400TBW endurance. The company is releasing two lineups for its first self-branded SSDs, WD Blue and WD Green. The drive also offered a SATA III 6Gbps interface for storage, using firmware to determine caching to the solid-state storage module.Īfter announcing its plans to acquire SanDisk last fall and completing the acquisition for $19 billion earlier this year, the company is now ready to introduce its first self-branded solid state disks to consumers based on the SATA interface in 2.5-inch and M.2 2280 form factors. In May 2013, the company released its first solid-state hybrid drive, the WD Black SSHD, featuring NAND flash from SanDisk between 8GB and 24GB in capacity, with performance up to 450MB/s reads and 350MB/s writes. in mid-2009, it indicated an interest in expanding its traditional disk drive industry into the solid-state storage market, giving it the means to form the WD Solid-State Storage Business. Western Digital is a company with a rich history in developing hard disk technologies that have become widely adopted since the era of floppy disk formatters/controllers and the ATA interface.Īfter the company bought Siliconsystems Inc. This benchmark tool measures the performance of a storage device by testing its sequential read and write speeds as well as its random read and write speeds using blocks 512K and 4K in size.Similar to SanDisk X400, but may need pricing adjustment Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that it performs equally well with both incompressible (0%) and compressible (100%) data.įirst, I ran a few quick tests using CrystalDiskMark. For comparison, I've also included test results from the Crucial MX100, SanDisk Extreme Pro, Samsung SSD 850 PRO, Plextor PX-256M6S, Toshiba Q Series PRO, Plextor PX-256M6M, Samsung SSD 840 EVO mSATA, OCZ Vector 150, OCZ Vertex 450, Silicon Power Slim S55, Samsung SSD 840 EVO, Seagate 600 SSD, SanDisk Extreme II, Plextor PX-256M5M, OCZ Vector, Plextor PX-256M5PRO Xtreme, Samsung SSD 840 PRO and Samsung SSD 840.Īs I mentioned earlier, the 240GB version of the Ultra II is based on Marvel's 88SS9190 controller chip. To test the performance of SanDisk's 256GB Ultra II SSD, I ran a series of benchmarks using CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1, HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0, ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.46, AS SSD, HD Tune PRO 4.61, Anvil's Storage Utilities and Iometer. For the operating system, I installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Enterprise. ![]() The computer came equipped with an Intel Core i5-2400 CPU, 4GB of DDR3 1333MHz memory, Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3250312AS 250GB SATA 6 Gb/s hard drive, NVIDIA Quadro FX580 512MB PCIe graphics card and an Intel 82579-LM gigabit network card. The test system used in this review was an HP 8200 Elite.
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