Western Digital decided that it needed to amp up its game buy gobbling up one of the industry’s largest flash storage companies. A move they felt was was necessary as they try new strategies to make sure their brand is equally respected in the world of SSD (solid state drives) as it is with disk-type drives (HDD). Just $19 billion later, and SanDisk belongs to WD.
This is a smart move on their part as they have hit a few walls with SSD in the past and need to try something new to stay afloat as the world moves away from the HDD format of things–also, SanDisk has a lot of patents behind their name (a lot). SSD is the future (at least for now) as computer enthusiasts quickly upgrade for faster boot times, lightning fast file transfer speeds and enhanced system reliability. Upgrading to an SSD is currently one of the most significant performance enhancements that you can offer a computer.
SSD has found it’s way into all of the latest performance gadgets, including Microsoft’s new Surface Book, which is taking the market by storm right now. From this point forward, you can expect to see SSD taking over as the default option as regular HDD models are reserved for intense storage capacity needs.
Prices for SSD have been falling more than ever in the last year and will continue to do so as they break into higher capacities. Eventually HDD will not longer be needed as long as we can reach similar capacity heights with both at a reasonable price. Of course, by then (which shouldn’t be too far away), they will most likely be working on the SSD killer–a technology that blows both drive types away (as long as it isn’t “the cloud”).
