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Western Digital launches first SiliconDrive SSDs

by Scott Bicheno on 16 June 2009, 16:56

Tags: WD (NYSE:WDC)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qaspg

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Solid move

Hard drive giant Western Digital seemed to have been slow to acknowledge the growing demand for solid state drives (SSDs), until it shelled out $65 million for SiliconSystems last March.

Today it has announced the first products to result from that acquisition, in the form of the SiliconDrive III range, which are targeted at embedded and data streaming applications.

"The launch of SiliconDrive III will also enable WD to leverage its global sales and distribution channels to accelerate the adoption of SSD technology beyond SiliconSystems' traditional embedded systems OEM customer base into data streaming applications such as multimedia content delivery systems and data center media appliances," said Michael Hajeck, senior VP and GM of WD's solid state storage business unit.

The range includes 2.5 inch SATA and PATA drives and 1.8 inch micro SATA products. The emphasis has been put on performance and reliability as these drives are designed to be used constantly for several years. There is no indication as yet that WD plans to enter the consumer SSD market.

You can find out more about these drives here.

 

HEXUS Forums :: 5 Comments

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Posted by b0redom - Tue 16 Jun 2009 17:14
“The emphasis has been put on performance and reliability”

Max R/W Speed - 100/80 MB/s :O_o1:
Posted by kalniel - Tue 16 Jun 2009 17:57
b0redom
“The emphasis has been put on performance and reliability”

Max R/W Speed - 100/80 MB/s :O_o1:

Which if they get that in multiple situations can end up being faster in real world use than a drive claiming 200 MB/s. Read that article at anandtech about SSDs and how they were asked to recommend improvements - one of them was a suggestion to fix a certain type of writing speed, which although pegging back the drive performance under 100MB/s actually produced a faster drive in real world testing.
Posted by TooNice - Wed 17 Jun 2009 00:39
If I remember correctly though, the issue at the time was to do with drive stutter (which I see more as a ‘bug’). Now that the Vertex (and other drive using the same controller/firmware) no longer has that issue, they can once again focus on pushing transfer rate. That said, transfer rate for small files remain on the low side (relative to larger files), so if the WD can somehow improve on that, then perhaps we could see some real world improvement.
Posted by LuckyNV - Wed 17 Jun 2009 12:09
b0redom
“The emphasis has been put on performance and reliability”

Max R/W Speed - 100/80 MB/s :O_o1:

there is more to drive performance than sequential transfer, SSDs will typically have random access speeds at 0.1-0.2ms, standard 7200rpm drives are 11ms-15ms, even VRs are only 5-6ms at best
Posted by TooNice - Thu 18 Jun 2009 08:17
^ I doubt b0redom is making comparisons to 7200RPM drives.

Access time between SSD drives are fairly minimal which is why people look at transfer speed. And compared to some exiting drives in this price range, the WD, at least on paper, does not appear to be a speed demon.

(And it's also worth noting that on the same token, there is more to a drive than random access)