SanDisk says goodbye to WD Blue and Black SSDs, hello to new “Optimus” drives
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Yet another nonsensical naming scheme. Thanks a lot computer hardware manufacturers!
I imagine this will be redone again in 5 years just like the Dell Pro Max or whatever it is
I imagine this will be redone again in 5 years just like the Dell Pro Max or whatever it is
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Seems fine now but have to wait and see how well the do going forward. I love how every company thinks they need power rangers naming schemes with 500 adjectives in the name of the highest end device.
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As far as rebrandings go this is one of the less terrible ones I think. The color system with western digital never made sense communicating to customers, like the article says at least the adjectives let you know the tiers lol.
Not A big fan of over the top gamer aesthetics, and who cares since noon gamers don't put windows in their cases, but that styling is pretty sweet looking.
Not A big fan of over the top gamer aesthetics, and who cares since noon gamers don't put windows in their cases, but that styling is pretty sweet looking.
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At least the equivalent part number is being used until the next distinctively new units come out. I think it's more so people leave old stock unsold because the new name is more impressive. Which probably won't be in this case but still they have to account for it.
From what i recall from some employees from one side once mentioned to me. Is when they merged Sandisk though they were getting WD's distribution and manufacturing expertise and WD was getting Sandisk tech. And when it was all said and done both sides realized both marketing departments really oversold what either was capable of.
From what i recall from some employees from one side once mentioned to me. Is when they merged Sandisk though they were getting WD's distribution and manufacturing expertise and WD was getting Sandisk tech. And when it was all said and done both sides realized both marketing departments really oversold what either was capable of.
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Western Digital's handling of this ought to be a case study in what not to do. They've squandered the WD brand, which was really better known even for SSDs. Sandisk was better known for flash drives and memory cards.
This is now the third name for the SN850X. It started off as the Western Digital WD_Black SN850X, then the SanDisk WD_Black SN850X and now the SanDisk Optimus GX Pro SN850X.
This is now the third name for the SN850X. It started off as the Western Digital WD_Black SN850X, then the SanDisk WD_Black SN850X and now the SanDisk Optimus GX Pro SN850X.
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What's in a name, anyway? What matters to me is price, which I fully expect to go through the roof for the exact same products. After all, the AI slop won't pay for itself.
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Maybe next they'll offer a SanDisk Optimus GX Pro Bono SN850X and it will be free SSDs for everyone.
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Sandisk were always dependable (for me) with the memory cards.
They should get into the DRAM business to lower the damn prices where selling one kidney isn't enough.
They should get into the DRAM business to lower the damn prices where selling one kidney isn't enough.
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Look, I don't care what you call them as long as they're reliable and decently priced.
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I did have a crush one of the yellow ones. Don't remember her name.
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What's the rationale for splitting up the company into two based on the technology? Technology goes out of date and shifts and moves, so trying to split things off into "spinny disk" vs "SSD" seems strange because you'd think that there's enough overlap in these segments that they would actually want to work together. Like, why not have SSD-based NAS drives, or hybrid drives, or what? Is this is like, some way to try to write off assets or some other corporate tomfoolery?
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It's already gone through the roof. I paid US$600 for the SN850X 8TB drive on September 5. Just looked and it's now listed for $1979. It was $929 last week.
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As I'm not a professional, I wish they had more unprofessional kit for me to purchase.
Really, though, the colour system was much easier as long as there was a key to reference.
Really, though, the colour system was much easier as long as there was a key to reference.
WD™ Gold.
As orionquest recently noted:
https://meincmagazine.com/civis/threads/slow-imac-retina-4k-21-5″-2019-with-fusion-drive-–-upgrade-to-ssd.1471581/orionquest said:
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I had the misfortune of having to use that last month as it was the only way to disable the LED on a SN850X. It lagged horribly on switching between tabs, and I will try to avoid any product that requires it in future.
The only saving grace is that the LED remained disabled even after uninstalling it.
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I think they missed out on renaming the WD Black to Sandisk Optimus Prime.
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Shortly followed by the SanDisk Optimus Prime GX Pro Bono SN850X, which is exactly the same except you have to watch a 30 second ad every time you try to access the drive (don't worry, if you are accessing a large file you will get to watch more than one ad).
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I need three external SSDs. One for Time Machine, one for a longer-term duplicate of my Mac’s SSD, and one (relatively) large SSD for everything/anything else. Reliability is more important than speed, cheaper would be better. Shouldn't be complicated to figure out how to get that.
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The Asian one or the African American one? (I only was there for the first 2 sets before I lost track.)
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"WD Black drives will become 'SanDisk Optimus GX Pro'”
What a crock of shit. Leave it to marketers to fuck up everything.
I was familiar WD's simple naming schema, and I appreciated it.
Now this shit: "SanDisk Optimus GX Pro.” I mean, why not go for it all--the "SanDisk Ultimate Optimus GX Lightning Platinum Pro+”?
But I guess it's a timely change, as prices of SSDs (and probably all PC hardware) triple over the next six months, and we'll all be forced to rent our computational time.
What a crock of shit. Leave it to marketers to fuck up everything.
I was familiar WD's simple naming schema, and I appreciated it.
Now this shit: "SanDisk Optimus GX Pro.” I mean, why not go for it all--the "SanDisk Ultimate Optimus GX Lightning Platinum Pro+”?
But I guess it's a timely change, as prices of SSDs (and probably all PC hardware) triple over the next six months, and we'll all be forced to rent our computational time.
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And the whole time it's actually been a Sandisk SSD - evidenced by drilling down through the PCIE bus in HWINFO64 (Sandisk NVME Controller), although this is true for all (or certainly most) now former WD consumer SSDs. Probably obvious but pretty sure that's where the SN___ naming came from.
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"Shouldn't be complicated to figure out how to get that."
Oh, come on! That's so old school! In fact, it should be virtually impossible to get that.
(The wife and I took a little mini vacation last October. The process of finding the lowest price--indeed any price as advertised--on a hotel room was more difficult than mastering tensor calculus. It's the 21st century, a time when purchasing anything is an exercise in navigating a perpetual puzzle of deception and intentional confusion.)
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Even for those of us with a glass side panel, once the M.2 stick is under the heat spreader^, it really doesn't matter what it looks like.
^ I assume people who buy M.2 sticks with integrated spreaders and then use them that way exist, but I have a hard time believing that group has a significant overlap with the glass side panel group.
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The use of "Pro" in branding in general is usually ridiculous.
What's "professional" about a telephoto lens or a 120 Hz display? You could argue that the ability to join a domain is a "pro" feature, I suppose.
In SanDisk's case "Pro" just means faster, I guess? Because certainly no amateurs need apply for a faster SSD. Not like, say, gamers, would make more use of one than somebody using Word in the office.
Edit: Hah, I really need to include Ars in this too.
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HMB = Host Memory Buffer, which is RAM (and algorithm) used for SSD caching
HBM = High Bandwidth Memory, which is an interface for high speed RAM
I know the alphabet is limited, but it is just painful to look at such similar acronyms in adjacent fields. Oof.
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I think I might have snagged the last reasonably priced SSD for the foreseeable future. I snagged an SN850X 2TB for $139 black Friday weekend, today they are going for nearly double that at ~$250-280. The ram and ssd suppliers are certainly using AI as a convenient excuse to jack prices up (no, I don't believe that they're actually diverting most of their output to AI data centers, these are cartels that have been repeatedly found to collude on price hikes outside of normal supply and demand cycles).
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Shhh....talk about this too much, and someone will start selling diamond heat spreaders so people can see RGB LEDs on their SSD. At astronomical prices, of course. (before the industry decides the diamond spreader and its price are integral to the SSD design).
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not touching this until they announce the pro max level /s - I refuse to buy storage that does not have max in the name, which is why my most precious possessions are MAXtor drives attached to a pc/xt nas running dos 3.1!
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How reliable are today’s external SSDs vs. external hard drives for backup applications (such as Apple’s Time Machine)? Has long-term reliability improved?
Thanks
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sigh seagate will be next im sure. swear to god companies have such contempt for consumer market. like they actively hate us with confusing bullshit like this.
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Yeah. I got pretty lucky there too. I picked up 2x 1tb Samsung 990 EVO Plus and one 2tb 990 Pro back around Prime day a couple months ago. Those drives are all much more expensive now compared to what I paid for them and should be plenty to take care of my M.2 SSD needs for quite a while. At today's pricing I'd just be dealing with what I had as there's no way I'm paying today's prices for things.
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Manufacturing and use cases are usually very different for the two types, I imagine, and the companies may have never been very well integrated, geographically or business-wise, since they're effectively undoing a merger in some sense, and re-splitting previously separate companies back into subsidiaries.
I don't see why they wouldn't sell NAS SSDs, as you suggest, they'd just do it under the SanDisk branding.
As for hybrid drives, to the degree that we mean that in meaningful way—substantial capacity NAND and hard disks in the same drive—I'd guess that the manufacturing and firmware would be so different that they'd probably do a collaboration between subsidiaries at a new manufacturing location.
But I'm genuinely not sure what the advantages of such drives would really be, vs. having two separate drives. Many HDDs do already include some amount of NAND memory as read/write caches, as I understand it, but that's about as far as it typically goes.
What would you suggest is the benefit of putting a HDD and an SSD in the same drive—I mean, one that would be so beneficial that it's got an obvious business case over just using two different drives?
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Not nearly as cool as the WD Raptor and VelociRaptor. Bring back that marketing team.
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Why does the Time Machine backup or Duplicate drive need to be an SSD? Time Machine should be fine on a HD and it's going to be much easier to get a larger capacity at an affordable price with a HD. AFAIK HDs are better for long term storage anyway, especially if the drives will be disconnected or powered off for extended periods of time as the cells in an SSD may need to be refreshed periodically and that can't happen if the device is not on.
Before prices went stupid a 1tb SSD was a pretty small price premium over a 1tb HD. Now it's about 2x the cost. Scaling gets much worse from there with a 4tb SSD being $300+ and a 4tb HD being $100 or less. In hard drives $300 bucks can get you into 12 or 14 tb drives. That seems like a much better way to go for a Time Machine drive. 8 TB SSDs are $800+ and are not even close to competitive on price per capacity metrics.
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You've got to be very careful with that, You're one misunderstanding away from giving everyone a free U2 album, as Apple unfortunately discovered.
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purposelycryptic
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Trading in the well-regarded, popular WD SSD branding for the significantly less well-regarded SanDisk one, that many still heavily associate with that horrible self-destructing portable SSD debacle, is certainly a bold move.
Not wise, or logical, but definitely bold.
"Volunteering for front-line infantry" bold.
Not wise, or logical, but definitely bold.
"Volunteering for front-line infantry" bold.
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