Not to mention the SMR fiasco, as well as their deceptive marketing around the RPM their drives run at. 5400 RPM “class” isn’t 5400 rpm, it’s likely a binned 7200 drive.

Sarcasm aside, this news is absolutely baffling unless they’re merely trying to dump the sandisk name and then make their own in-house flash instead for a “clean slate” to the less technically inclined. Which, given how scummy and deceitful they’ve been over the years, wouldn’t surprise me at all.

Flash is the future. HDDs still have the best $/TB now, but that’s absolutely not going to be the case forever unless we start seeing collusion where flash and spinning disks “stay in their lane” so to speak with flash continuing to get useless sequential speed increases at the cost of capacity while HDDs stay the course they always have been.