Western Digital (WD) — is one of the most recognized brands in the world of solid state drives and hard drives. However, going forward, WD will no longer manufacture or sell SSDs.
Last week, the company officially completed the spin-off of its NAND memory business unit. From now on, this business will be completely taken over by SanDisk, and Western Digital will focus exclusively on hard drives.
WD CEO Irving Tan outlined the company’s future after the reorganization:
«Our rich history of HDD innovation has defined us for decades. And I’m excited that we can focus even more on developing the best storage solutions for our customers.»
Obviously, WD’s customers will remain companies and users who need large amounts of storage.
However, for gamers, this is more of a farewell to the legendary Western Digital SSDs. Many people chose WD as a reliable brand for their gaming PCs. For example, the WD Black SN850X model was popular.
At the same time, SSD production is not going away – it’s just a corporate reformatting. In fact, SanDisk has been leading this area for a long time, since last year. All flash memory operations were transferred to the SanDisk brand, including the sale of WD SSDs. Moreover, this step was officially announced back in October 2023, so it did not come as a surprise.
As for the production itself, it will not change either. WD did not have its own NAND memory production facilities — the company used the facilities of Kioxia (formerly Toshiba). SanDisk is likely to continue this cooperation or find an alternative supplier, such as Samsung.
For users, nothing will change globally, except that the WD name will no longer appear on new SSDs. But then the question arises: what will happen instead? After all, SanDisk’s SD abbreviation may be associated with memory cards, not high-performance solid-state drives.
It is worth noting that the SSD business has not been cloudless for Western Digital lately. Recently, the company faced a lawsuit because SanDisk external SSDs deleted data and stopped working.
Source: pcgamer