WD To Enter SSD Market Again With New SSD Series

Back in March 2009 Western Digital purchased SiliconSystems for $65 million in cash with the hopes of becoming a player in the Solid-State Drive market and to fill the SSD void in WD’s portfolio. Back then the SSD market was worth about $400 million and acquiring SiliconSystems’ for their SATA SSD expertise looked good to the executives. One year later in March 2010 WD released their first SSD to the market with the WD SiliconEdge Blue 2.5-inch SATA II SSD series.

The WD SiliconEdge Blue 256GB SSD was a SATA II drive and was rated with up to 250MB/s sequential read s and 170 MB/s sequential write speeds. We did an in-depth review on the WD SiliconEdge Blue 256GB SSD when it was released and found that it wasn’t competitive with other drives on the market at that time.

The problem with that drive six years ago is that when doing sustained writes the performance fell all the way down to 0.2 MB/s and it was priced higher than comparable consumer SSDs. Due to the performance and pricing it obviously wasn’t recommended to our readers and Western Digital quietly stopped producing the drive and exited the SSD market. The WD SiliconEdge Blue used MLC NAND Flash and not TLC NAND Flash that is widely used on entry-level SSDs today, so this was well before sustained write issues were commonplace.

Flash forward to more recent times and you’ll learn that Western Digital announced the $16 billion acquisition of SanDisk in October 2015 and closed the deal in May 2016. The merger has allowed WD to once again strengthen their SSD portfolio as SanDisk was the second largest supplier of SSDs in Q1 2016 as the company shipped nearly 4 million SSDs for 12.8% market share. The Hard Disk Drive (HDD) market is slowing down thanks to the struggling PC sales, so having a strong NAND Flash storage division will allow WD to compete in the data storage market for smartphones, tablets, servers and of course PCs.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that it has been reported that WD will be launching new SSDs at GITEX (Gulf Information Technology Exhibition) Tech Week 2016 that is being held later this month in Dubai. The folks over at PC Mag have an interview with a Senior Sales Director for WD that confirmed the news today.

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Update: 10/4/2016 14:30 CT: It looks like the interview with Khwaja Saifuddin went out early and PC Mag pulled the original story. WD kindly asked if we’d update our story, but since it’s already on social media and Google Cache there isn’t too much we can do. We removed the quote and product nomenclature.