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The drive uses an undisclosed third-party storage controller and firmware that have been tweaked by Western Digital itself for improved performance. Although they wouldn't reveal who's behind the controller, Anand did some digging around and identified its internals as JMicron's JMF612 (same as Crucial's Reactor series). The controller features a garbage collection routine and supports TRIM and Native Command Queuing, which is to be expected of modern SSDs. Western Digital won't be offering a manual TRIM tool for non-Windows 7 systems, though.
The SiliconEdge Blue uses a 3Gbps Serial ATA interface and can reportedly sustain reads at 250MB/s and writes at 140MB/s -- maximum write speed is 170MB/s. There's 64MB of DDR2 cache memory and Western Digital claims the drive can process 5,000 IOPS with random 4KB reads and writes. Unfortunately performance tests show the SiliconEdge Blue is no match for Indilinx-based or Intel SSDs, yet it is more expensive than both.
The drives will be available in 64, 128, and 256GB capacities with suggested retail prices of $279, $529, and $999, respectively. (Note: as mentioned in the comments, Newegg.com has them for $249.99, $449.99, and $799.99) Intel's significantly faster X25-M G2 160GB on the other hand can be had for $429, while OCZ's Vertex Turbo 120GB are selling for as little as $360 these days.
User Comments: 8
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newegg already has them for sale
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Newegg's price is also lower that what's shown here - $249.99, $449.99, and $799.99 respectively. Not exactly at prices for "consumer grade" yet, if you ask me - especially when they don't outperform cheaper products.
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About time WD came up with something on the SSD front... but those specs and prices are far from impressive.
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They just made a nice move with making the SSD with 256 GB capacities. They will gain a lot of costumers, and at the end, they are good positioned at the market at the moment.
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It will be nice if they offered a 5 year warranty on there ssd like they do for there ata hard drives.
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Too bad the performance isn't on the same level as some competitors. I really like WD's products, but I wouldn't buy a slower, more expensive product just because it's from WD.
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Can someone please tell all these manufacturers to start reducing the price. New drives keep coming out but none are in an affordable range. Sorry but for me I have only just reached the right size drive for my needs, where I have been unable to fill the drive, and that size is 500GB. I doubt I will be upgrading for at least another 5 years.
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SSD's are a huge market and WD entering that market just shows that not only is it profitable but if they can dominate and bring down the price/performance ratio of SSD's much like what they have done with Mechanical HDD's It's Win/win for everyone.
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