Western Digital Gets with the Program, Starts Shipping Its Own SSDs

Western Digital, one of the world's leading vendors of storage products, has just announced that it has begun shipping its new SiliconDrive III SSD product family, following the company's acquisition of SiliconSystems back in March 2009. With this announcement, Western Digital joins the increasing number of companies that have recently announced storage products based on the latest developments in NAND Flash technology. According to the vendor, the new solutions deliver faster read/write speeds and increased storage capacities, which should make them a worth-considering alternative for embedded and data streaming applications.

“SiliconDrive III is the first example of how WD plans to productize solid state technology developed by SiliconSystems. 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 vice president and general manager of WD's solid state storage business unit. “SiliconDrive III is an ideal solution for OEMs that require increased performance, capacity, reliability and data throughput in their applications.”

Among some of the features that have been enabled in Western Digital's latest line of 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch SSD products, the company has felt the need to highlight the PowerArmor, SiSMART and SolidStor technologies, designed as monitoring solutions for the drive's health state, providing users with critical information on their drive's life expectancy. As far as technical features go, the new drives have been featured with native SATA 3.0Gbps or ATA-7 interface, with read and write speeds of up to 100Mb/s and 80Mb/s, respectively.

Although no details have been made available on the pricing of these new Western Digital drives, the company announced that the new solutions would be available in storage capacities ranging from 30GB to 120GB.