Western Digital

Every Tier of Storage, From Pocket Flash Drive to Data Center Rack

Western Digital builds the hard drives, solid state drives, flash drives, and memory cards that IT professionals, system builders, surveillance installers, and content creators rely on for every storage tier, from pocket-sized USB sticks for everyday file transfers to enterprise-grade NVMe SSDs for workstation and server workloads. The catalog includes the WD brand for internal drives tuned to specific workloads, the SanDisk brand for portable SSDs, flash drives, and memory cards, and specialty firmware lines like WD Purple for surveillance and WD Red for NAS environments. As one of the two largest storage manufacturers in the world, Western Digital designs and fabricates its own NAND flash and hard drive platters in-house, giving every product line an engineering consistency built on proprietary silicon rather than third-party components.

Western Digital for Every Environment

• Surveillance and security systems — WD Purple drives use AllFrame AI firmware to reduce frame loss in multi-camera NVR environments, with WD Purple Pro adding support for deep-learning analytics servers
• NAS and multi-bay storage arrays — WD Red and WD Red Plus drives are tuned for the vibration profiles and always-on duty cycles of RAID enclosures running 24/7 in small offices and home labs
• Desktop and laptop computing — WD Blue SATA and NVMe SSDs deliver the mainstream performance-per-dollar sweet spot for system builders, IT refresh cycles, and everyday computing upgrades
• Gaming and creative workstations — WD Black NVMe drives provide peak sequential and random read/write speeds for fast game loading, video editing scratch disks, and large asset libraries
• Field photography and video production — SanDisk Extreme PRO SD cards and microSD cards rated for 4K and 8K video capture handle the sustained write speeds that professional cameras and drones demand

How to Choose the Right Western Digital Drive

Western Digital organizes its product line into color-coded families, each engineered for a specific workload. Choosing the right drive starts with matching the workload profile and form factor to the correct product line.

Workload-Tuned Firmware: Color-Coded Drive Families

WD Blue targets mainstream computing with balanced performance and cost. WD Black is optimized for peak throughput in gaming and creative workloads. WD Red and Red Plus are firmware-tuned for the continuous vibration and always-on operation of multi-bay NAS enclosures. WD Purple uses AllFrame technology to prioritize sustained sequential writes for surveillance DVR and NVR systems. WD Gold and Ultrastar deliver the workload ratings and mean-time-between-failure specifications that enterprise data centers require. Each color family runs firmware calibrated to its target environment, which means a WD Red drive handles RAID array vibration differently than a WD Blue drive in a single-drive desktop, even when the two share similar capacity and spindle speeds.

Form Factor: 2.5-Inch, 3.5-Inch, M.2, and Portable

3.5-inch drives fit desktop towers, NAS enclosures, and surveillance NVRs where capacity per bay matters most, with models reaching 22 TB and beyond. 2.5-inch drives serve laptops and compact enclosures. M.2 2280 NVMe SSDs connect directly to the motherboard for maximum throughput in desktops and workstations, while the shorter M.2 2230 form factor fits ultrabooks, Steam Deck, and compact mini PCs. SanDisk Extreme and Extreme Pro portable SSDs provide rugged, pocket-sized external storage with USB-C connectivity for editors, photographers, and field technicians who need fast access to large files on the go.

Western Digital Product Lines

WD Brand Drives

• Western Digital Hard Drives — mechanical and hybrid drives in the WD Blue, WD Red, WD Purple, and WD Gold families for desktop, NAS, surveillance, and enterprise workloads

SanDisk Portable and Removable Storage

• SanDisk Flash Drives — USB flash drives from the Ultra, Extreme PRO, Cruzer, iXpand, and Dual Drive families in capacities from 8 GB to 2 TB
• SanDisk Solid State Drives — internal and portable SSDs including WD Black, WD Blue, WD Red, and SanDisk Extreme portable drives in SATA, M.2, and USB-C form factors
• SanDisk Memory Cards — SD, microSD, and CompactFlash cards from the Extreme PRO and High Endurance lines for cameras, drones, dashcams, and IoT devices