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Western Digital is no stranger to low capacity, high performance, pricey storage solutions, only up until this point they've always fallen under the company's VelociRaptor line. That all changes today, as WD announced its first-ever consumer-oriented solid state drive (SSD), the SiliconEdge 2.5-inch SSD family.
"The development of the WD SiliconEdge Blue product family leverages WD's extensive experience in designing and manufacturing highly reliable storage products and the company's worldwide sales and distribution network to accelerate SSD technology adoption by OEMs, technology enthusiasts, gamers and road warriors," said Michael Hajeck, senior vice president and general manager of WD's solid state storage business unit. "Customers who demand the ultimate in performance will find the WD SiliconEdge Blue SSDs exceed all their requirements."
The new drives ship in 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities and features a native SATA 3Gpbs interface. Read speeds come rated at up to 250MB/s, while WD says you can expect writes in the neighborhood of 170MBs. TRIM support also comes standard, as does NCQ.
In addition to performance, WD is touting the SiliconEdge family's ruggedness, saying the product line has "passed WD's extensive functional integrity testing procedures" consisting of over 250,000 of testing.
The drives are available now for $279 (64GB), $529 ($128GB), and $999 (256GB).
Image Credit: Western Digital
Comments are closed on this article
Gameaholic1337
March 04, 2010 at 11:16pm
I wonder if they are using the same naming scheme for these as their non-SSD drives. The Cavier Blue is "Performance and reliability for everyday computing" line and their Caviar Black is their "Maximum performance for power computing" line so I wonder if we can a faster WD SiliconEdge "Black" in the future. If I had $999 bucks to blow on storage right now though I would get the OCZ Z-drive with the PCI-E interface. More competition in the SSD market is good. Hopefully this means lower prices.
MajorlyCool
March 03, 2010 at 1:38pm
Paul, please don't confuse 3 Gb/p with SATA 3.0! These are SATA II drives according to WD's website. http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=787
I was really hoping they were SATA III!
Paul_Lilly
March 03, 2010 at 2:16pm
Nice catch - WD's wording in their press release duped me.
-Paul Lilly
mlee19
March 03, 2010 at 1:14pm
SSD still cost too much!! I will be sticking with HDD a little longer.
