Western Digital announces WD Blue SN550 NVMe SSD

Western Digital is a name often associated with quality hard disk drives, but the company's solid state drives are quite excellent too. They are reliable and fast, making them a good choice amongst other trusted brands of SSD, such as Samsung and Intel.

Today, Western Digital unveils its latest solid state drive. Called "WD Blue SN550," it is an M.2 2280 NVMe SSD with read speeds up to 2,400 MB/s. As a sign of the company's confidence in the drive's reliability, it comes with a respectable 5-year warranty.

"Today’s content creators use data storage at ever-increasing rates. Whether it’s working with 4K/8K video, large document files or storage-intensive applications, these digital environments demand reliable performance, durability, speed, and capacity that the NVMe interface can deliver. According to Forward Insights, NVMe is forecast to account for more than 75 percent of the storage shipped in the PC segment by 2021. Leveraging the proven reliability of Western Digital’s NVMe product portfolio, the WD Blue SN550 NVMe SSD is built to address these four core demands, transforming them from pain points to creative productivity,"  says Western Digital.

WD further says, "Whether working, creating, casual gaming or processing large amounts of data, the WD Blue SN550 NVMe SSD can deliver over four times the speed of Western Digital’s fastest SATA drives. With boosted internal speeds, this brings a better overall computing experience for multitaskers and resource-heavy application users who want a fast and responsive system to tackle tough workloads. In addition, an upgraded thermal design enables ultra-responsive PC performance and sustained performance during intense use."

Eric Spanneut, vice president and general manager, Client Business Unit, Western Digital provides the following statement,

Taking an NVMe-first approach can speed up system performance tremendously. This translates to less time waiting on data, so creators can work smarter, not harder, to increase both output and potential income. The WD Blue SN550 is a great option for customers looking for an all-NVMe portfolio. For a system builder, it means Western Digital delivers a full portfolio of NVMe and SATA SSDs, as well as high-capacity hard drives. This gives them immense flexibility to build systems for our customers’ varying needs.

Western Digital has not yet revealed pricing, but we should learn that detail once the drives hit retailers such as Newegg and Amazon, which should hopefully be very soon. What we do know, however, is that capacities will range from 250GB to 1TB.