Western Digital Spins off all Flash Products to the SanDisk Brand

[btarunr]

Western Digital made a significant change to the way it sells its products, which sees the SanDisk brand return to prominence. The company spun out SanDisk.com as a separate website, with product information, support, and in select regions, online retail, of all its NAND flash-based products, including SSDs, memory cards, USB flash drives, etc. Meanwhile, its main website, WesternDigital.com, now only lists out non-flash products, such as hard disk drives (HDDs), NAS, and other enterprise hardware such as rackmount DAS or NAS.

The decision splits WD's portfolio vertically, regardless of market. SanDisk now includes both client- and enterprise flash-based products, while Western Digital covers both enterprise, SMB, and client HDDs, including HDDs with gamer centric WD_Black branding. Meanwhile, the SanDisk website includes all of Western Digital's flash-based products, including SSDs and portable SSDs that retain the Western Digital brand. So, the easiest way to understand this split would be: if it has disks that spin, find them on WesternDigital.com, and if it's solid-state, find it on SanDisk.com.



The split in websites also splits support accounts. Enterprises and SMBs keep support accounts with their hardware providers, who could face some adjustments, as Western Digital describes in its news release:

In addition, we now have two specialized Support websites. Western Digital Support will continue to support all HDDs and platform products while SanDisk Support will support all flash products from the Western Digital family of brands.

To ensure a smooth Support experience, we have created a SanDisk Support account under the same email address for all existing Western Digital Support customers. When signing in to SanDisk Support for the first time, you will be prompted to reset your password.

As of this writing, we've been sifting through the News sections both websites, and could not find any information on whether this split in websites is part of a larger organizational restructuring within Western Digital, specifically, whether this means that WDC is spinning off SanDisk.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[Chaitanya]

Good.

 

[Ferrum Master]

Good decision. There is not enough money in SSD business as they do not produce their own NAND or controllers really. Even Intel spun off their stuff...

 

[TheLostSwede]

Good decision. There is not enough money in SSD business as they do not produce their own NAND or controllers really. Even Intel spun off their stuff...

Sorry, what? WD/SanDisk has their own inhouse controllers and they own half of Kioxia's NAND fab, which is why there has been a lot of back and forth between Kioxia and WD.

 

[AusWolf]

I didn't even know WD and SanDisk were the same company. I guess I got lost in all these acquisition news somewhere.

 

[TheLostSwede]

I didn't even know WD and SanDisk were the same company. I guess I got lost in all these acquisition news somewhere.

It was only a bit over eight years ago...

Western Digital Completes Acquisition Of SanDisk

Western Digital Corporation today announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary Western Digital Technologies, Inc. has completed the acquisition of SanDisk Corporation. The addition of SanDisk makes Western Digital Corporation a comprehensive storage solutions provider with global reach, and an...

www.techpowerup.com

 

[Wirko]

Sorry, what? WD/SanDisk has their own inhouse controllers and they own half of Kioxia's NAND fab, which is why there has been a lot of back and forth between Kioxia and WD.

Yeah it's all entangled, when you buy a flash-based product from WD, it's actually [WDSandiskKioxiaToshiba], to the best of my understanding.

Even this new "spin-off" seems to be just rebranding, not actually splitting a business in two. However, it might be a sign of things to come.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Yeah it's all entangled, when you buy a flash-based product from WD, it's actually [WDSandiskKioxiaToshiba], to the best of my understanding.

Not quite, as the fabs are co-owned in a joint venture, but WD/SanDisk doesn't own any part of Kioxia.
Kioxia is owned by:

However, SK Hynix owns 19% of the Bain Capital stake, which is part of the reason that Kioxia and WD couldn't merge...

 

[Chrispy_]

Wait, so the WD SSDs are being rebranded SanDisk?

I though the SN-series of WD drives like the 580, 770, 850X were both successful, well-known, and have an entire internets worth of positive reviews. Why throw that branding away, exactly?

 

[Ferrum Master]

Sorry, what? WD/SanDisk has their own inhouse controllers and they own half of Kioxia's NAND fab, which is why there has been a lot of back and forth between Kioxia and WD.

They don't get margins, what causes you think that they give WD special prices or operate at loss? We can argue how much in house that controller really is, Gen4 blacks are Phison E18 siblings, they even have the same compatibly bugs really, try using them with ARM64.

The enterprise(where the money is) will Gen5 use FC5161... They have the software team firmware, for sure... hardware? nah... they pay someone for the tech.

 

[TheLostSwede]

They don't get margins, what causes you think that they give WD special prices or operate at loss? We can argue how much in house that controller really is, Gen4 blacks are Phison E18 siblings, they even have the same compatibly bugs really, try using them with ARM64.

Uhm, considering that it's a joint venture at 50/50, WD gets half of the output out of the NAND fabs at whatever the production cost is. WD is after all one of the largest SSD OEM's out there, alongside Samsung, Solidigm/SK Hynix and Micron.
And what about all the other SSD controllers? It was one of the reasons that WD bought SanDisk, as they wanted their IP which is largely a wide range of NAND controllers, be that for SSDs or any other type of flash memory.

The enterprise(where the money is) will Gen5 use FC5161... They have the software team firmware, for sure... hardware? nah... they pay someone for the tech.

Again, they make their own controllers for a lot of their products based on SanDisk tech. I obviously can't swear it's all of them, as I don't have that kind of insight, but at least many of their SSDs have used inhouse controllers.
This is a few years old now, but shows one example.

The Western Digital WD Black 3D NAND SSD Review: EVO Meets Its Match

www.anandtech.com

 

[Caring1]

Wait, so the WD SSDs are being rebranded SanDisk?

I though the SN-series of WD drives like the 580, 770, 850X were both successful, well-known, and have an entire internets worth of positive reviews. Why throw that branding away, exactly?

Did WD even make SSDs prior to the acquisition of Sandisk?
They're not exactly throwing their branding away, a lot of Sandisk products were rebranded.

 

[Eternit]

"including HDDs with gamer centric WD_Black branding" Is any gamer still interested in HDDs?

 

[Chrispy_]

Did WD even make SSDs prior to the acquisition of Sandisk?
They're not exactly throwing their branding away, a lot of Sandisk products were rebranded.

Sure, prior to the Sandisk Aquisition there's around 6 years of reviews history using Marvel+Micron - predominantly 2.5" SATA drives but that was the most common standard back in 2010-2016. I think their first SSDs were JMicron+Samsung but many of the sites I remember reading about those on have collapsed and vanished now.

 

[Ferrum Master]

SSDs have used inhouse controllers.

My point is that those so called in house controllers are actually just certain Phisons with custom firmware. If we look historically Sandisk before used Jmicron, Marvell and Silicon Motion controllers. Basically just as Kingston does, just orders a laser engraved IC and wrote a firmware. Basically what's the fuss, it is normal. Even Samsung uses Silicon Motion in their most popular USB3 flash drive BARs... The Blue SATA uses Marvell 88SS1074, while SATA is dead(500 was silicon motion), but is used in external drives, including that Samsung BAR. That Blue drive is also in the infamous SanDisk Extreme Portable, that broke down and spoiled the reputation at such degree, that nobody wants them anymore.

WD is right to get rid of it.

 

[Chrispy_]

My point is that those so called in house controllers are actually just certain Phisons with custom firmware. If we look historically Sandisk before used Jmicron, Marvell and Silicon Motion controllers. Basically just as Kingston does, just orders a laser engraved IC and wrote a firmware.

100% Wrong.

From the Anandtech Review of the WD Black 3D (six years ago):

"In addition to the major advance of switching from 15nm planar TLC NAND to 64-layer BiCS 3D NAND, the new SSDs also feature Western Digital's own new SSD controller instead of using a controller from Marvell. This is a major shift toward vertical integration for Western Digital/SanDisk, and is the best strategy for Western Digital to differentiate their products in a market crowded with dozens of brands sourcing their controllers or the entire drive design from the same small handful of vendors."

If you look at the acquisitions of WD and Sandisk a few years prior to the launch of this first in-house controller from WD/Sandisk, you see they acquired enterprise SSD controller firm sTec, and was also working on SSD joint ventures with Kioxia who own all the Indilinx IP. With access to two SSD controller IPs it's kind of surprising that it took WD so long to launch their own in-house controller - though arguably the wait was worth it because their first-gen controller hit it out of the park and shot to the top of the performance charts at launch trading blows with the #1 spot held by the Samsung 960 Pro.

 

[Ferrum Master]

100% Wrong.

Your point... The WD850 Black is E18. Business always favors the winner. Their product stack shows already, they still use multiple solutions.

 

[Chrispy_]

Your point... The WD850 Black is E18. Business always favors the winner. Their product stack shows already, they still use multiple solutions.

No it isn't.

The WD SN850 controller is a SanDisk 20-82-10035. Not only is it a different spec to the E18, it's a different physical size, and it performs differently to the E18-equipped drives like the KC3000 and Rocket4. There's no way any sane person could be convinced it's an E18.

You are in denial that one of the largest and most successful storage companies on earth is making its own controllers, despite it spending billions on acquiring multiple SSD companies including one that exclusively designed SSD controllers. I'm pretty sure they didn't do that just for funsies.

What is your agenda, exactly?