WD Goes Green (and Blue)

Western Digital has gone both blue and green. The maker of hard drives and storage devices has a new line of high-capacity solid state drives (SSDs) that emphasize either the high-performance or the “green” nature of the sustainable power consumption levels.

In WD’s parlance, blue means fast. Green means environmentally friendly. And today, the company is introducing a new generation of its new WD-branded SATA client SSDs that complement the hard drives for PCs and workstations that are part of its traditional business. WD acquired SanDisk, a maker of flash memory-based SSDs, for $19 billion in 2015.

Irvine, California-based WD positions the SSDs as the ultimate solution for do-it-yourself PCs, extending the life of a current PC with capacities that can reach as high as one terabyte. Consumers such as DIY fans, PC enthusiasts, gamers, and content creators are the target market.

WD says the new drives are reliable and have quick boot times and increased program responsiveness. Consumers benefit from the combination of reliable storage with an industry-leading 1.75M hours MTTF, coupled with reduced power and less heat when compared to HDDs.

Both the blue and green SSDs include free, downloadable WD SSD Dashboard software, which allows continuous performance and capacity monitoring. The devices are ultra-thin, they’re speedy at video transfer, and the dashboard is quite easy to monitor.