WD to Ship Its First SSDs
SATA/ATA 1.8- and 2.5-inch units, up to 120GB, for the embedded market
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on June 16, 2009 at 3:32 pmWD has begun shipping its new SiliconDrive III SSD product family based on technology from its March 2009 acquisition of SiliconSystems.
The company’s new SiliconDrive III products feature faster read/write speeds and increased capacities, and offer mechanical scalability, making them a perfect storage solution for embedded system and data streaming applications such as multimedia content delivery systems and data center media appliances.
SiliconDrive III SSDs include 2.5-inch Serial ATA (SATA) and Parallel ATA (PATA) and 1.8-inch Micro SATA products featuring native SATA 3.0 gigabits per second (Gbps) or ATA-7 interfaces with target read speeds up to 100 megabytes per second (MBps) and write speeds to 80 MBps in capacities up to 120 gigabytes (GB).
"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."
SiliconDrive III has been designed and optimized for high performance and high reliability in demanding 24×7 applications in the embedded systems, media appliance and data streaming markets. Performance and reliability is achieved through the integration of the company’s patented and patent-pending advanced storage technologies in every SiliconDrive III product. The company’s patented and patent-pending PowerArmor, SiSMART and SolidStor technologies address critical OEM design considerations such as the elimination of drive corruption due to power anomalies, the ability to monitor a SiliconDrive’s useable life in real-time and integrated advanced storage technologies that ensure data integrity and SSD life for multi-year product deployments.
Comments
If you exclude flash chip makers like Samsung and Toshiba, WD is the first HDD maker to announce and to ship SSDs, even if the specs are not impressive. ExcelStor, Hitachi GST and Seagate seem to be far to be ready.
Chips used (SLC or MLC) as well as prices were not revealed by WD.
According to a WD, SiliconDrive III is not for a consumer based environment it is geared for the embedded market, not for desktop or for client systems. "SiliconDrive III's target read/write speeds are lower than other SSDs because its feature set was designed for the embedded system and data center edge markets, which value data integrity, reliability, and features such as PowerArmor and SiSMART, over raw speed. These customer requirements are vastly different from consumer enthusiasts who place a high premium on speed. SiliconDrive III is designed to perform flawlessly in very demanding conditions."
The company targets the following applications:
- Automotive - diagnostic, safety, navigation, and entertainment systems
- Data Center - media streaming appliances, load balancers, and blade servers
- Industrial - robotic systems, industrial workstations, and remote data collection systems
- Medical - Portable monitoring equipment, MRI/ CAT scan imaging, and ultrasound equipment
- Military - mission data recorders, field computers, and GPS systems
- Netcom - edge routers, wireless base stations, and NAS and SAN appliances
- Video surveillance - law enforcement, locomotive cabs, and public transportation
- VoIP and streaming media - media gateways, media servers, and application server platforms
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