Skip to main content

Western Digital is testing the SSD waters with new midrange and budget drives

The Western Digital brand has long been the answer to the question of which hard drive to buy when building a system. The rapid proliferation of solid state drives has relegated WD’s Black and Red drives to data storage duty, but it hasn’t slowed down the company’s ambitious plans at all. The recent acquisition of Sandisk brings a wealth of new properties to WD’s arsenal, and the newest to find its way to market are the Green and Blue solid state drives, in both 2.5-inch and M.2 form factors.

Those familiar with WD’s existing color-coded structure will recognize blue and green as the more budget-friendly tiers. The Blue SSDs, available in 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB volumes, are the more performance-oriented of the two new families. With quoted sequential reads up to 545 megabytes per second and writes up to 525MBps, these drives fall in line with others in their price range, like the perennial favorite Samsung 850 EVO.

Recommended Videos

Where they really excel is endurance. The smaller 250GB is rated for 100 terabytes written, while the 500GB version is rated for up to 200 TBW, and the 1TB reaches a whopping 400TBW. The Samsung option doesn’t come close, with a 75TBW rating for the smaller drives, and 150 for the larger volumes. These Western Digital drives should last a good, long while.

The 250GB version of the Blue will run you $80, and the 500GB version will sell for $140, with the 1TB reaching $300. These drives are likely to take a place in DIY builds and modest gaming machines when the price is right, compared to the Samsung.

If performance isn’t as important as price and power usage, the WD Green SSDs may be more your speed. Available in more modest 120GB and 240GB configurations, the drives are slightly slower, with a quoted sequential read of up to 540Mbps and write at up to 405Mbps.

Endurance suffers a bit as well. The Green SSDs are rated at just 80 TBW for the 240GB drive, and half that for the 120GB version. No word on pricing yet, but Western Digital says the Green SSDs will roll out later this quarter.

No matter which drive you choose, you’ll have access to the Western Digital Dashboard, a software suite that allows you to manage performance and capacity on the fly.

We have the 2.5-inch version of the Western Digital Blue SSD in-house, and hope to have our testing for a full review complete soon. We’ll update this post as more pricing and performance info becomes available.

Brad Bourque
Brad Bourque is a native Portlander, devout nerd, and craft beer enthusiast. He studied creative writing at Willamette…
SK Hynix might dethrone Western Digital with this SSD
SK hynix Platinum P41 SSD.

SK Hynix has just announced the release of a brand-new PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD that should prove to be one of the best SSDs in terms of input/output operations per second (IOPS).

Set to potentially become one of the fastest such drives on the market, the SSD is already available on Amazon. However, as is the case with many other SSDs, not every variant of the SK Hynix Platinum 41 will offer such top speeds.

Read more
Blistering-fast Western Digital SSDs hit up to 7,300MB/s
Western Digital Black SN850X NVMe SSD.

Western Digital announced a bunch of new products, and among them, there is a new version of the WD_Black SN850 NVMe SSD. It arrives updated with faster speeds, lower latency, predictive loading, and some new cooling tech.

Upon release, the new SSD may swiftly climb the ranks of the best gaming SSDs of the year.

Read more
Watch this new lunar rover take a test drive in an otherworldly desert
Astrolab's FLEX lunar rover prototype.

With NASA heading back to the lunar surface in the next few years, the agency is calling on private firms big and small to help design all of the necessary infrastructure to make it happen.

While spaceflight giant SpaceX already has a contract to build a lunar lander for NASA’s upcoming Artemis missions, a smaller but no less ambitious startup called Astrolab is working hard on the creation of a rover that it hopes will one day roll across the lunar surface.

Read more