Western Digital begins shipping in-house SiliconDrive III SSDs

Western Digital today announced that it has begun shipping its new SiliconDrive III solid-state drive product family based on technology from its March 2009 acquisition of SiliconSystems and featuring feature faster read/write speeds, increased capacities and mechanical scalability, the company says.

SiliconDrive III SSDs include 2.5-in. SATA and PATA and 1.8-in. Micro SATA products featuring native SATA 3.0 Gbps or ATA-7 interfaces with target read speeds up to 100 MBps and write speeds to 80 MBps in capacities up to 120GB.

The Register's Chris Mellor explains the significance of the move:

WD's main competitor in the hard disk drive market, Seagate, is also intent on entering the SSD market...this product launch is a stepwise enhancement by WD, both of SiliconSystems' technology and of SiliconSystems' market territory, which makes use of WD's global channel. It is not marketing these drives for use in storage arrays as hard drive replacements, or as general server or storage array controller caches. Instead, it is saying that the SSD qualities prized by SiliconSystems' military, medical and industrial embedded system OEMs - reliability, data integrity, speed and robustness - are also applicable to more general enterprise use.

WD says the SiliconDrive III family is intended for high performance and reliability in demanding applications in embedded systems, media appliance and data streaming -- in other words, general enterprise use.