For a long time Western Digital was the performance drive maker of choice, with its Raptor hard drives spinning at 10,000 RPM offering the best consumer middle ground without the need to step up to expensive and even more noisy, SCSI drives. But that was a long time ago and today SSDs are dominant, so it's exciting to see that WD is back in the SSD game.
However WD isn't shooting for industry defining performance just yet. It's re-entered the game with its Blue and Green branded drives, which traditionally offered entry level performance at an affordable price point. However, quality may be a little different since WD now owns Sandisk, but the biggest change is that with this new SSD release line up, WD is now one of the world's biggest storage sellers once again.
WD Blue drives are available in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB forms, offering speeds up to 545MBps/525MBps read/write respectively, as well as 100,000/80,000 for random read/write IOPS. The smaller versions don't quite hit these numbers, but they aren't far off.
They're all available in either traditional SATA configurations or M.2 form.
The same is true for the WD Green drives, though they are only available in 120GB and 240GB sizes, with much reduced performance. The highest they hit is 540MBps/465MBps sequential read/write and 37,000/68,000 IOPS for random read/write.
