WD Black and Blue SSDs are some of the most widely recognized client drives on the market, but their branding is about to disappear. Following Western Digital's flash-business spinoff, SanDisk announced it was retiring the beloved names and rebranding its NVMe lineup under the SANDISK Optimus banner.

Going forward, WD Blue drives, like the SN5100, will be sold as SanDisk Optimus drives. Meanwhile, the company's higher-end WD Black drives, like the SN7100 and SN8100, will bear the Optimus GX and GX Pro names.

Despite WD being among the oldest and most recognized names in PC storage, the rebrand was inevitable. In late 2023, Western Digital announced the spinoff of its flash memory business. WD took custody of the hard drive biz while SanDisk walked away with its NAND Flash division. The divorce was finalized in early 2025, and this week, SanDisk's lineup of WD Black and Blue SSDs took its name once again.

With that said, the WD Black and Blue brands aren't entirely dead. Western Digital continues to sell hard drives under the WD Black, Blue, Red, Purple, and Gold brands. The Register has reached out to WD for comment; we'll let you know if we hear anything back.

For those concerned, the change could affect supply; the rebrand is unlikely to change much. SanDisk was always responsible for the WD SSD line. The underlying hardware and tooling haven't changed hands. You might need to adjust your search query to target the Optimus brand if you can't find any old-stock WD Black or Blue drives at your favorite e-tailer, but for the moment, the hardware isn't changing.

While the rebrand is unlikely to impact supply, the global memory shortage certainly could. If you haven't noticed, NAND flash — the kind used in SSDs — and DRAM — found in DDR, LPDDR and GDDR systems and video memory — has skyrocketed in price over the past few months. As you might expect, AI is at least partially to blame.

• Micron says memory shortages are here for the foreseeable future
• Micron ditches consumer memory brand Crucial to chase AI riches
• Raspberry Pi prices hiked as AI gobbles all the memory
• Tired of sky-high memory prices? Buckle up, we're in this for the long haul

According to the market watchers at TrendForce, client SSD prices could increase by more than 40 percent in the first quarter of 2026. And because SanDisk doesn't operate its own fabs — most of the memory modules are actually made by Kioxia — the company isn't immune to market forces.

In the press release announcing the rebrand, SanDisk didn't discuss its plans for the rest of its WD-branded flash products, many of which are still listed on its product pages. We've reached out for comment, but considering the company already has SanDisk-branded equivalents to many of these products, we expect any lingering WD-branded SSDs simply won't be restocked once they're gone.

SanDisk isn't the only memory vendor to kill off a beloved storage brand in recent memory. In early December, Micron announced it was shuttering its Crucial brand of consumer memory and storage products to chase AI riches in the enterprise and datacenter. ®