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

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.

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.