Western Digital Launches First SSD

Vigile writes "The solid state disk market keeps getting more crowded, but the Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue SSD marks the first offering from a player that currently dominates the market of traditional spindle-based hard drives. It was a year ago this month that WD purchased SiliconSystems for $65m, a small, enterprise-level SSD vendor that developed its own storage controller. Western Digital obviously made the move to prepare the company for the inevitable situation it finds itself in today: solid state has surpassed traditional media in performance and will likely soon become the mainstream storage choice for computers. PC Perspective has put the first consumer-level SSD option from one of the kings of HDDs through the wringer and found the drive to be a solid first offering, with performance on par with the some of the better solutions in the market while not quite fast enough to take away the top seatings from Intel and others. Western Digital has seen the writing on the wall; the only question is when the other players in the hard drive market will as well." Hot Hardware ran their own series of tests, coming to a similar conclusion: "There is no question the SiliconEdge Blue doesn't light up the benchmarks like some of the more recent SSDs we've tested, but it's a solid product from a well-respected brand name storage company."

Comments

Any word about the write cycles limit?

[BhaKi]

That's one thing everyone seems to be forgetting.

Re:Any word about the write cycles limit?

[trickyD1ck]

My Intel M25 G2 is supposed to last 5 years assuming 20GB are written to it daily, which is pretty conservative. I doubt that in 5 years I am going to use any piece of electronics I own now, so the problem of write cycle limit can be considered solved for all practical purposes.

Re:Any word about the write cycles limit?

[Ephemeriis]

Any word about the write cycles limit?
That's one thing everyone seems to be forgetting.

I don't think anybody is forgetting anything. With wear leveling and whatnot the MTBF is pretty comparable to that of a traditional HDD. Especially given how quickly capacities are growing and how often drives get upgraded or replaced.

The odds of you burning out an SSD by hitting the write cycle limit before you want to replace it anyway are fairly slim.

Flat panel monitors all over again

[gelfling]

Just when large CRT monitors became affordable albeit heavy, the companies rolled out smaller flat panels. Not only where they cheaper for them to make, they were cheaper to ship and had much lower field defect rates. So of course they charged more for them.

Similarly right when magnetic drives are near-free, the companies roll out smaller, and in some cases slower SSD's which are less expensive to make, cheaper to ship and over the long run (probably) have lower field defect rates born of their no moving parts. So of course they will charge more for them.

Everything old is new again. Wait and see companies that offer Netbooks with NO storage as an 'option' and then charge up the wazoo for a crappy sized SSD touted as 'premium'.

Re:Flat panel monitors all over again

[Junior J. Junior III]

And in a few years, LCDs came down in price so quickly. In 2002, I bought a *cheap* but decent quality 17" LCD monitor for $400. In 2010 I can buy a comparble quality 24" monitor for around $225. You can now buy a 46" HDTV for well under $1000 today. You could NEVER buy a CRT of that size for so little. And it was a rarity to see a CRT TV larger than 37" anywhere but in the wealthiest homes.

Once manufacturers recoup their R&D costs and achieve economies of scale, the prices on SSD will come down too. Once are close enough in cost compared spinning magnetic media that their additional benefits outweight any cost advantage of spinning disks, HDDs will become obsolete, and the entire market will switch to SSD, and then they'll get even cheaper.

Price & Performance

[MonsterTrimble]

Honestly, I wouldn't worry about Price & Performance yet. For all the talk we're still in the early adopter phase and it's only a matter of time before these things hit critical mass. Like the summary said: Western Digital has seen the writing on the wall; the only question is when the other players in the hard drive market will as well

Re:Gah

[bigstrat2003]

My problem with SSDs isn't even the price per GB (which is bad enough). It's the amount of space, period. Currently, on Newegg, their Intel SSDs (I singled out Intel as they reportedly make the best) come in a maximum of 160 GB. That is honestly a pathetic amount of storage. When the drives come in at least 500 GB sizes, then I'll consider them. Not a moment before.

Re:Please don't let this get like LCD monitors

[Pentium100]

The LCD thing pisses me off too. While I have a CRT monitor that is quite good, people usually advise me to buy a LCD and their argument is usually that then I could have two monitors. Yes, I could. One behind the other. It wouldn't do me any good though.

Now it will be the same thing with hard drives. In a way, it already is. I don't need the drive to be super fast, no. 30-40MB/s of linear read speed would be enough for most of my drives, but I have to buy 7200RPM drives with a lot of cache that do 100MB/s. How about a huge 5.25" Full Height drive with >10 platters that does 40MB/s and has 50ms full seek. The drive would probably be cheaper or more reliable because of the lower data density or it would have much more capacity than the regular 3.5" drives.

I don't trust flash based storage devices. If the power supply fails and sends +30V where 5V should have been the flash memory will be destroyed with all its contents. If this happens to a hard drive, I could at least bring it to a data recovery company (if the data is very valuable) or try to recover the data myself (if the data is not that valuable). It would probably only need a circuit board replacement. Oh, and flash memory has a limited number of write cycles.

Re:Please don't let this get like LCD monitors

[Anonymous Coward]

I like this post. Too bad it *won't* get the credit it deserves in the mod system (haha, right now it's at -1: Troll), but I'll weigh in (as AC of course) and say that I do agree, by and large, that the quality of electronic consumer goods is definitely sucking lately.

Other examples include:

- PC keyboards (I still have 80s-era IBM keyboards that work flawlessly)
- Audio equipment (can anyone say "iPod earbuds?" or "bad mp3 bitrates")
- Overreliance on lame fly-by-wire technologies (Toyota, etc)

Not to sound like a luddite, of course, but, c'mon people...

Oh, and if I'm gonna be -1 anyway:

- A monoculture computing milleu dominated by a monopoly where a single OS dominates the public's conception of what a computer should be able to do.

mainstream

[fulldecent]

you'll know SSD has gone mainstream when they do 512 GB + 256 GB = 0.8 TB

Re:Buy three. What are you afRAID of?

[tepples]

I'm afRAID to tell you that the TRIM command is unavailable in RAID sets

Why is this the case? Why can't the RAID controller split up a TRIM on the array into TRIMs on each drive?

Re:Gah

[Waccoon]

The nice thing about an SSD is that it's small and can handle the brunt of the big jobs that need speed. So, I decided to replace my single 7200 RPM 3.5" drive with an SSD for the boot drive, and a 5400 RPM 2.5" drive for storage. I will never go back to hard drives for the boot system, no matter how much space I need. Mounted on a 3.5" adapter, both drives take up the same amount of space as a single 3.5" drive, and everything runs incredibly cool in near silence. With the speed of the SSD for my main projects, the slow speed of the laptop hard drive is a non-issue. SSDs really shine with fragmented files, anyway, so the big stuff like games and movies doesn't benefit from an SSD, anyway. Even the games running off the laptop drive are damn fast with both drives running in tandem.

If you really need everything to look like it's running on one drive, just map a network drive or use file system links. You can put the hard drives into RAID and map that, although that's a lot more trouble than I'd be willing to put up with. I don't need that level of performance, and RAID isn't a backup solution.