Posted June 27, 2019
Dray2k: A question though, do the HDD tools for WD also suffer from bloat? I heard that WD do make the best HDDs right now.
You're welcome! :) I installed today the SanDisk SSD Dashboard (210 MB installer), which is similar to the Western Digital SSD Dashboard, because I couldn't find the WD one as an offline installer. Only a small 352 KB online installer, which I don't like.
I ended up with the application's folder (422 MB and 464 files) and three MSVC 2015 redistributables (see the attached pic). The SSD Dashboard failed to start properly due to some OpenGL .dlls missing on my virtual machine.
I hope that helps you, if you're interested in buying some WD/SanDisk SSDs. The WD Blue 3D and SanDisk Ultra 3D are good drives (probably the same internally), but personally, I'll stick with the Samsung Evo (has 600 TBW endurance vs. 400 TBW WD/SanDisk, for the 1 TB variants), which is around the same price here. Just avoid the WD Green and SanDisk SSD Plus.