It’s hard to imagine the SSD market without Western Digital in it. The company’s WD_Black SN850X model is something of an icon within the space, both for its specifications and style. However, the brand is formally exiting the market and any successors to its existing stock will fly under the flag of SanDisk instead.
Western Digital’s departure is a few years in the making, as the company announced plans to split in two back in 2023 after talks of a merger with Kioxia fell through. It planned to finish the process during the 2H 2024 but for whatever reason dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s took until Q1 2025, announcing its completion to the public via a blog post on its website.
Moving forward, Western Digital will focus solely on its HDD business. CEO Irving Tan explains that the growing storage demands of AI is the driving force behind this decision, from which “HDD exabyte shipments are expected to increase.” From the sounds of things its attention will primarily fall on enterprise markets rather than consumer, but I expect it will continue offering models in the latter.
SanDisk is now wholly responsible for the production and support of NAND products, including solid-state drives. It’s unclear when we’ll see the first consumer drives materialise from the company or what form they’ll take. However, Western Digital did reveal its PCIe Gen 5 controller back in 2024 so expect it to show up in a SanDisk SSD soon.
I won’t deny that part of me is sad that there won’t be a direct successor to the likes of WD_Black SN850X. However, I am excited to see how SanDisk crafts a spiritual one and curious to see how it will translate its microSD and external SSD stylings to internal drives, if at all.
I’ll keep my eye out for any announcements from SanDisk. In the meantime, follow Club386 on Google News so you’ll know as soon as it lands and can stay up to date with all the site’s musings on tech. If you’re hungry for some thoughts on SSDs, stay tuned for something you won’t want to miss in the coming weeks.
