SanDisk says goodbye to WD Blue and Black SSDs, hello to new “Optimus” drives
In late 2023, storage company Western Digital announced plans to split itself into two companies. One, which would still be called Western Digital, would focus on spinning hard drives, which are no longer used much in consumer systems but remain important to NAS devices and data centers. The other, called SanDisk, would handle solid-state storage, including the drives that Western Digital sold to consumers under its Blue, Black, Green, and Red brands.
That split effectively undid what Western Digital did a decade ago when it bought SanDisk for $19 billion. And we're just now starting to see the way the split will affect the company's existing consumer drives.
Today, SanDisk announced that mainstream WD Blue and WD Black SSDs would be discontinued and replaced by SanDisk Optimus-branded disks with the same model numbers.