Dearly beloved…
“Beloved”? names? Get a grip! Familiar ok, but if you get emotional about the brand names of SSDs you clearly need to get out more. Have you tried a dating app?
SanDisk heals WD Black and Blues, rebrands beloved client SSDs
WD Black and Blue SSDs are some of the most widely recognized client drives on the market, but their branding is about to disappear. Following Western Digital's flash-business spinoff, SanDisk announced it was retiring the beloved names and rebranding its NVMe lineup under the SANDISK Optimus banner. Going forward, WD Blue …
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Thursday 8th January 2026 15:08 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Dearly beloved…
Marketing uses branding to generate such emotional attachments. It seems odd to see them throw away all the work that's been done. OTOH I see these names on Amazon and they mean as little to me as the odd character strings used to label all sorts of Chinese-made products.
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Thursday 8th January 2026 09:39 GMT lordminty
"Going forward, WD Blue drives, like the SN5100, will be sold as SanDisk Optimus drives."
Well I still won't be buying any, especially as their NVMe SSDs don't work with Raspberry Pis.
To quote Pimoroni:
'These drives need the extra SUSCLK clock signal to function. If it’s not present, you see nothing and the drive sulks. Except sometimes they work. Maybe. Maybe not. Given how many drives work really well and cost relatively little, and the reported problems with the WD drives, we just recommend avoiding them'
Also, virtually all of the HDDs I've had hard fail were WD drives and in one case, a rather spectacular failure in a desktop machine. I know this is just my experience, but...
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Thursday 8th January 2026 22:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Also, virtually all of the HDDs I've had hard fail were WD drives
Conversely, I've just retired a sixteen-year-old WD Green HDD that was the main drive in my home system for ten years and still used for data storage/access in that system for another six and was still working fine (albeit with fairly modest use).
Only reason I'm still not using it is that there's no real need, and no point in pushing my luck with a drive that had already lasted way longer than might have been expected.
Then again, the WD Green HDDs (**) were supposed to be more energy efficient and I believe they did so by running slower than the "normal" 7200RPM under many circumstances. I suspect that may have stressed the mechanism less?
Regardless, that was the HDD line, not SSDs, and I'm going to assume that- even after several years of ownership- the formerly (and now again) separate SanDisk/SSD division would have remained somewhat distinct. So I'm not sure how much can be said about one on the basis of the other.
in one case, a rather spectacular failure in a desktop machine
Is that as interesting as you made it sound and, if so, would you like to tell us about it? :-)
(**) Discontinued for HDDs many years before WD revived the "Green" name/colour for SSDs.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
