The name Western Digital, or WD, is pretty ubiquitous with both HDD and SDD storage. But it looks like we will no longer be seeing the two letter branding in future SSDs. This is because the company has “announced the successful completion of the planned separation of the company’s Flash business”.
While the announcement was made recently, plans to do so were being made as early as October 2023, when the company’s intent to merge with Toshiba spin-off Kioxia ended up not happening. Now that the company has separated itself from its own Flash business, it will be focusing entirely on HDDs, while subsidiary SanDisk takes over Flash storage.
Considering this is a move over a year in the making, hiccups caused by the transition are expected to be minimal. For the average consumers, this just means no longer seeing WD-branded SSDs such as its Black and Blue series once the still circulating units run out. Of course, there’s also the possibility of SanDisk simply inheriting these SSD series from the parent company.
Western Digital CEO Irving Tan says that this gives the company “a reinvigorated focus on HDD technology”. Which is all well and good for the parent company, but subsidiary SanDisk still has the issues with its Extreme V2 SSDs, and the associated lawsuit, looming over it.
(Source: Western Digital [1], [2])
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