WD flashes first SanDisk drives: Blue and Green WD has produced Blue and Green branded SATA SSDs, based on SanDisk technology, with these brands having been used for WD disk drives previously. The Green brand is for secondary storage, being reliable, cool and eco-friendly whilst Blue products are built for PC primary storage use. Other WD brand colours include Black for …
rated the green drives much. Got all enthusiastic about them at first, then after using them it's not so much that I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole, but I would chuck them off the barge and into the canal to die a watery death that even then is far kinder than they deserve.
I've got 8*2TB Green drives in my NAS boxes. I know they're not really intended for that use but this was before WD started doing the Red drives for NAS/SOHO use. In 6 years I've had one mechanism fail - that was within 3 years of purchase and WD did a simple swap for a new one. Thankfully no data loss as the NAS boxes are set up in RAID 1 mirroring (they're rather old SPARC ReadyNAS Duo boxes so that's as sophisticated as it gets).
The big desktop PC has Black drives in it though.
These are Green SSD in the article. The Green HDD... I tried to use in a RAID. They kept spinning down, and when they had spun up again and synchronised, the time taken would often be beyond the allowed range for the controller, so error time... The same when they were used as boot drives or primary disks, just too damned slow (paging files I guess, I don't know - I didn't do the diagnostics just put them all to one side when I figured out they were no good for that use). As secondary storage, they were fine.
I'm not touching WD again. They shipped with spin down and parking bugs for YEARS across multiple product lines. I know SSDs don't spin down or park heads but there's a mind boggling laziness and lack of dedication to quality when you can't ever get around to fixing a crippling firmware bug.
Seems like the differential product marketing is working on you both. I personally miss the HGST days, it was a lot easier then. One drive, job done. Reliability never a question.
Gold too now I come to think of it...(or has that replaced Purple) or something. All the colours of the rainbow for a tiny cost difference in the motor/motor's stability+firmware used.
Pure marketing - nothing that couldn't be offered through WD Dashboard.
Let's bet the WD Dashboard monitoring software doesn't work with existing Sandisk SSDs. And if it goes anything like the Samsung HDD acquisition by Seagate. Returning a Sandisk branded SSD under warranty just got a million times harder, with a bloat of broken links.
What fun Sandisk SSDs owners will have, though I'm just going on my Samsung -> Seagate experiences. I never did buy another batch of Seagate devices, actively avoided them.
Maybe WD's drive cloning software will actually work on these nerw models now.
(It refuses to work on Sandisk-branded drives, even though the box proudly says "A Western Digital company". This was annoying enough to make certain that I'll return to Samsung SSDs next time.Damn shame you can't get Samsung spinning rust anymore. They weren't quick but their reliability was fantastic, and nobody buys rust for speed anyway.)
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