Many of us know Western Digital as one of the largest HDD manufacturers in the market and that they have, for the most part, solely relied on HDD storage sales to become the giant they are today. In recent times they've adopted flash into their products. This resulted in the current WD Blue SSHD and back in 2014 the WD Black2 drive, which we saw was basically an SSD and HDD slapped together in our review (http://thessdreview.us7.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=3d9b6193ffd32dd60e84fc74b&id=0fc36fb7b5&e=1230c2ab07) . These, however, are not and were not stand alone SSD products. They still have mechanical parts that are prone to failure and just cannot match the capabilities of a true SSD.

Because SSDs are taking ground in storage sales and, inversely, HDD sales falling quarter after quarter in recent years, WD had to do something more than just infuse NAND with their HDD components to maintain their competitiveness. In late 2015 we learned that their decision on the matter was to simply acquired an SSD company and their target of choice was none other than SanDisk. After months of back and forth discussion and agreements WD finally purchased SanDisk for roughly $16-$19 billion in May. This purchase has allowed them to easily gain precious SSD IP and other related assets, most importantly, access to a NAND supply. Since the acquisition, WD has stayed quiet on the SSD front...until now. Today marks the release of their first full-fledged SSD, the WD Blue SSD.