After the company bought Siliconsystems Inc. in mid-2009, it indicated an interest in expanding its traditional disk drive industry into the solid-state storage market, giving it the means to form the WD Solid-State Storage Business.

In May 2013, the company released its first solid-state hybrid drive, the WD Black SSHD, featuring NAND flash from SanDisk between 8GB and 24GB in capacity, with performance up to 450MB/s reads and 350MB/s writes. The drive also offered a SATA III 6Gbps interface for storage, using firmware to determine caching to the solid-state storage module.
After announcing its plans to acquire SanDisk last fall and completing the acquisition for $19 billion earlier this year, the company is now ready to introduce its first self-branded solid state disks to consumers based on the SATA interface in 2.5-inch and M.2 2280 form factors.