Western Digital enters consumer SSD market Written on March 3, 2010, by Scott.
After aquiring SiliconSystems, an enterprise SSD start-up, WD finally announced today the introduction of their consumer product line SiliconEdge Blue. The announcement leaves Hitachi as the sole remaining major hard disk drive manufacturer not offering a consumer SSD (Hitachi is integrating Intel drives on the enterprise side). Interestingly WD decided use a third party for their controller instead of leveraging a SiliconSystems design. The opted to use the new Jmicron JMF618 controller which supports Samsung NAND vs the 612′s Toshiba NAND.
Anandtech has an article up on the new drives. Pricing is inline with competing products $279 for 64GB, $529 for 128GB and $999 for 256GB. That’s list pricing so retail pricing will hopefully be lower. Due to the similar design as the Kingston SSD Now series Anand thinks it street pricing might reach the $2.20/GB level. Performance is inline with what we expect of a newer SSD, but still slower than Indilinx barefoot drives. Thus expect performance on the lower end of the scale when compared to other manufacturers. So with lacking speed and price innovation what does the SiliconEdge Blue bring to the table? WD is touting higher levels of compatibility and reliability testing which has gone into their exclusive firmware version for the SiliconEdge Blue.
Given the pricing, performance and an unproven controller design I’m tending to stick with Indilinx Barefoot SSDs which already have sub $2.20/Gb pricing on sale. Make sure to check out the Anandtech article for more details. I’ll be collecting more information on the recent Jmicron based drives and writing a follow-up post next.
Links:
- 03/03/10: Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue SSD press release
- 03/03/10: Anandtech: “Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue Review: WD Enters the Consumer SSD Market”
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