Western Digital has finally launched two new lines of SSDs products that cater to the consumer market.
Green WD SSD
According to Engadget, Western Digital has been for long a supplier of data drives for all markets but had avoided releasing solid-state drives for the consumer market. But according to BusinessWire, now, when the SSD technology began entering the mainstream, WD is finally unveiled its first SATA SSDs designed for personal computers.
According to TechReport, the announcement of the new Blue and Green WD SSDs comes five months after Western Digital acquired SanDisk, a company universally associated with flash memory. Western Digital named its new SSDs the same way as its entry-level hard drives. The two new SSD lineups are called Green and Blue.
The Green name is associated with hard drives with value and baseline performance. Those basic characteristics seem to be carried by WD over to its Green SSDs. They are in fact SATA drives coming in M.2 2280 and 2.5" form factors. According to tech experts, the WD Green SSDs appear to be similar to the SanDisk SSD Plus line.
Anandtech reports that these new WD SSD drives use a low-end Silicon Motion controller and come with no DRAM cache. They can achieve a middling performance. According to Western Digital, the Green SSDs are able to perform 37K IOPS on 4K random reads, 405 MB/s writes and 540MB/s of sequential reads.
The Green SSD drives offer a low final price and they are aimed at the low price-per-gigabyte market segment. The new drives only come in two storage capacity options: 120 GB and 240 GB. The 240 GB drive comes with an 80-TBW endurance rating that it is higher than some of its competitors in the budget SSD market.
Blue WD SSD
The new Blues SSD drives come with better specs. They are SATA drives coming in M.2 2280 or 2.5" form factors and use SanDisk 15-nm TLC flash technology, being very similar to the SanDisk X400. The Blue drives can reach a speed of 525 MB/s on sequential writes, 545 MB/s on sequential reads and 100K IOPS on 4K random reads-all numbers.
Like their cheaper Green SSDs, Western Digital also provides a three-year warranty for the Blue SSD drives. While the Green drives won't come on the market until "later this quarter" and the company hasn't revealed pricing on the Green drives yet, the Blue drives are already selling at retail. For instance, at Newegg the 1 TB WD Blue SSD sells for $319 as an M.2 drive or for $299 in 2.5" form.
