WD dips into mainstream SSDs with SiliconEdge Blue
updated 10:15 am EST, Wed March 3, 2010
Western Digital SSDs promise high speed
Western Digital this morning launched into the field of solid-state drives for the home by releasing the SiliconEdge Blue. The 2.5-inch SATA II drive is considered a drop-in replacement to speed up disk performance for notebooks or gaming desktops and has the performance to match. Among other SSDs, the Blue is fast with 250MB per second peak read speeds and 170MB for writes.
The SSD keeps in step with other flash-based drives and is shockproof to the US military's 810F standard while also being more reliable overall and more energy efficient than a rotating drive. Native command queuing is built-in, and Windows users get TRIM support to keep the drive running at full speed for longer periods of time.
The new SiliconEdge is already shipping and starts at $279 for a 64GB drive, with 128GB and 256GB models coming in at $529 and $999 each. Western Digital is also shipping a slightly slower drive, the SiliconDrive N1x, but this has no public price and is intended primarily for OEM tasks like servers and vehicles.
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Jul 2007
...but it doesn't use a SandForce processor
Right now, why would a Mac user buy any SSD other than the ones being sold under the Other World Computing brand name?
They are super fast and apparently that speed doesn't degrade over time as would be the case for virtually all other SSD's used in Mac systems that still don't support TRIM.
I keep hearing that many other manufacturers have SSDs with SandForce processors in the pipeline and I'm hoping that when they hit the market, prices will drop. In the meantime, there seems to be but one game in town...at MacSales.com.