Western Digital Departs SSD Market Leaving SanDisk Responsible for Existing and Future Products 

Western Digital has reportedly departed the SSD market, reprioritizing their efforts to focus on hybrid hard drives (HHD) instead. 

The SSD division was given to SanDisk — meaning products such as the WD_Black will not be produced by Western Digital, but instead will be manufactured by SanDisk. Hardware specialists expect the quality of the products to remain consistent, but the Western Digital brand will no longer be stamped on future SSD hardware.

As of March 7, the official reason behind Western Digital’s departure of the SSD market has not been revealed — but the decision is undeniably influenced by AI‘s increasing importance in the hardware industry. 

AI heavily relies on HHDs for storing massive amounts of data. This data is needed to train and optimized artificial intelligence models, which is undoubtably one of the biggest reasons Western Digital is reprioritizing their resources to focus on HHD production. 

Western Digital were once titans in the SSD market — having acquired SanDisk in 2016 with the goal of establishing strong footing in the flash memory space. Western Digital’s PCle Gen 4.0 achieved speeds of 7,000 MB/S — which were groundbreaking for gaming. 

Their innovative SSD products appealed to both consumers and enterprise markets, with budget friendly options alongside high-end performance products.