Following the acquisition of SiliconSystems earlier this year, Western Digital is taking its first steps into the SSD market announcing the SiliconDrive III product range. The drives are naturally based on SiliconSystems’ technology and target the same communications, embedded computing, data center, medical, military and aerospace markets.
The product range includes 2.5-inch (SATA and PATA) and 1.8-inch Micro SATA devices, featuring native SATA 3Gbps or ATA-7 interfaces with up to 100MBps read speeds write speeds up to 80MBps; in capacities up to 120GB. They are certainly not breaking any speed or capacity records here but apparently their main focus is in reliability, data integrity, and robustness.
The company’s SiSMART technology, for example, keeps tabs on the drive’s status in real-time, based on its usage patterns, and predicts when maintenance will be needed to replace it. Other features are designed for the elimination of drive corruption due to power anomalies, and to ensure data integrity and SSD life for multi-year product deployments. You can read more about the product launch in the press release after the jump.
Press Release
New Products Based on Third-Generation SiliconDrive Platform
LAKE FOREST, Calif., June 16 -- WD(R) (NYSE: WDC) today announced that it has begun shipping its new SiliconDrive(R) 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 24x7 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(R), SiSMART(R) and SolidStor(R) 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.
Web site at https://www.wdc.com/en/products/index.asp?cat=21.
https://www.techspot.com/news/35101-western-digital-intros-silicondrive-iii-range-of-ssds.html
