Wednesday, March 3rd 2010

WD Announces New High Speed Solid State Drives

WD today announced that the company is shipping its new high performance WD SiliconDrive N1x 2.5-inch solid state drive (SSD) family. The new SSDs feature fast read/write speeds in high capacities and are designed for embedded system OEM applications that require superior performance, high reliability and long product life. The single-level cell (SLC) -based WD SiliconDrive N1x SSDs are an ideal storage solution for a wide range of embedded system OEM applications in growing markets such as automotive and transportation, data center, communications infrastructure, video surveillance and industrial automation. The new WD SiliconDrive N1x family of products complements the recently announced multi-level cell (MLC) -based WD SiliconEdge Blue SSDs, which offer a cost-effective alternative for less-demanding OEM applications while still providing high read/write speeds and high random write IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) performance.

WD SiliconDrive N1x SSD products feature a native SATA 3.0 gigabits per second (Gb/s) interface with target read speeds up to 240 megabytes per second (MB/s) and write transfer rates up to 140 MB/s in capacities up to 128 gigabytes (GB). WD SiliconDrive N1x SSDs deliver maximum drive endurance and high sustained sequential write speeds to satisfy the 24/7 operational requirements in critical OEM applications. The WD SiliconDrive N1x products also feature WD's innovative Speed Assurance technology for consistent read/write performance.
"The WD SiliconDrive N1x SSDs are the newest addition to our SiliconDrive product family, which has shipped several million units since the first products were introduced. SiliconDrive SSDs have consistently met critical OEM application requirements for high reliability, high performance and long product deployment cycles," said Michael Hajeck, senior vice president and general manager of WD's solid state storage business unit. "Satisfying the challenging storage demands for a wide variety of OEM applications, WD has designed the WD SiliconDrive N1x and WD SiliconEdge Blue product families to facilitate SSD technology adoption in a multitude of existing and expanding new markets that can benefit from advanced storage solutions."

The WD SiliconDrive N1x SSDs feature patented and patent-pending WD technologies combined with Native Command Queuing (NCQ) and Windows 7 TRIM command support for high data integrity, long product life and sustained performance levels throughout the drive's service life without the need for an external refresh utility, media over-provisioning or forced idle times used by many SSDs available today.

The WD SiliconDrive N1x SSD comes with a five-year limited warranty. More information about WD SiliconDrive N1x SSDs may be found here. Information on the recently announced WD SiliconEdge Blue SSD may be found here.
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16 Comments on WD Announces New High Speed Solid State Drives

#1
Reefer86
interesting to see WD stepping into the arena of SSD'S
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#2
alucasa
Yep, about darn tme that they get into SSD market.
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#4
TIGR
+1 to all three replies above. Hopefully a well-established brand in the storage market like WD can sell in large quantities and eventually drive SSD prices down. It's great to see WD making the jump to a technology that really is quite different from what they've done [quite well IMO] for a long time.
Posted on Reply
#5
Suijin
Ah, looks like Newegg has these already for sale: $250, $450, $800 for the 64, 128, 256 GB respectively for the blue versions.

The intel 160GB goes for $430. I haven't compared the specs on them to each other though.
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#6
SteelSix
WD throws their hat into the SSD arena. :toast:
Posted on Reply
#7
Suijin
Have to probably find a review to be sure but it seems the WD drives suck a fair amount more power 0.6 W idle compared to Intel which is 75 mW idle. Also the WD takes 2-3.5 W peak to read and write while the intel takes 150 mW active. Now especially on the active part intel's number seems to be an average while WD's number seems to be the maximum, so it's hard to compare those 2. The idle though WD takes 600 mW idle while intel takes only 75 mW???
Posted on Reply
#8
Suijin
I personnally saw that Intel released their SSDs last year in the June/July timeframe and they were about the same costs as those above. So no cost improvement for 9ish months so far. I am guessing that they will release more SSDs in June/July again with increased capacity.

Based on all this I am going to get an SSD drive at that time, if I can get them when they are not all sold out that is. It also looks like I'll get an Intel brand, unless someone knows of a better brand (Intel seems to be the one leader at this point).
Posted on Reply
#9
Suijin
Seems like reviews at Anandtech and Hot Hardware say the same thing. The drives perform OK, not the best of the SSD drives, but mostly it's the price (they were going off of the MSRP published prices, actual prices at places like Newegg are lower $800 real versus $1000 MSRP for the 256GB version).

These prices are still higher than the competition (Intel), so it's hard to see how these are going to be very popular with consumers.
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#10
TIGR
Suijin....seems the WD drives suck a fair amount more power 0.6 W idle....
Ohnoes! I need a new PSU now!
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#11
Kantastic
YESS!!! WD is in the game!

Edit: Okay after reading the post I'm not too thrilled about the pricing, but for a newcomer they're not terrible. I'm hoping, like someone said, that large quantities will drive market prices down a fair bit so more and more people are able to get smaller drives for the OS and apps.
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#12
mlee49
Meh they're Blue Drives, wait till they come out with the Blacks.
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#13
Suijin
TIGROhnoes! I need a new PSU now!
Meh it was more of a comment on a difference I saw. Mostly only come into play for laptops and such where you may actually care about power draw.
Posted on Reply
#14
WarEagleAU
Bird of Prey
Not bad, but being Blue drives (might as well call them green drives in a sense) not impressed with the speeds. WD will step it up, but being a first release, I expected (seeing as they are what 1 - 2 years late in SSDs? Guess we can blame that on the delay in acquiring that one SSD development company) to come out with Sata 6.0 native. NCQ, TRIM, and write speeds up to 180MB/s.
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#15
Unregistered
Good! We need all major HDD producers to start producing SSD. More companies means tougher competition. And this can only be good for the end user. I hope they will start competing in the price sector also, not just specs one...
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