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

Re:Gah

[MachDelta]

I really want a SSD for my netbook - I worry about how much abuse the little thing takes in a day at school - but I can't really justify spending more on a hard drive than I spent on the entire computer!

*Sigh* Maybe for my next one.

Please don't let this get like LCD monitors

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't good replacements for mechanical HDs. They require tons of background work to keep wear leveling working and I don't trust normal day to day use (rather than occasional like you have now with SSDs in netbooks and storage drives) won't wear the things down incredibly quick.

Plus every single one I've ever tried do not have significant overall performance increase. Burst speed seems good but sustained and general use seems to be on par or even worse than standard mechanical drives, and writes are horribly slow.

But of course, since it's new and exciting and tons of attention are being focused on them, they will become standard despite their huge limitations, much like LCDs with their horrible motion tearing, flimsy hardware (barely touch any LCD screen and it's fucked) and overdriven colors that just makes things look "shiny" to make people think they look better when they really don't.

But soon enough I won't be able to even buy a goddamn real HD, just like I can't buy a CRT now thanks to companies convincing people to buy inferior products.

I really wish I could leave off AC on this post, but I know idiot mods are going to treat it as a troll post and mod it down to oblivion. But I truly believe this and am just stunned to the point of near-frustration at the ignorance of the buying public lately who will buy any new pile of garbage as long as it's hyped to hell. I mean, you have something like the worst piece of hardware ever that is KNOWN to fail eventually regardless (the XBox 360) and people are still buying the damn thing. That's incredible consumer ignorance, and makes companies realize they can put any pile of garbage out and people will buy it as long as it's hyped to death, which is horribly wrong.

Get some sense, people.

Re:Prices have to go down

[Kjella]

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like prices will go down much until Q4 when Intel get their next generation flash chips going. What is happening though is that many of the high-end controllers are massively increasing performance for a relatively small increase in price. For example my Vertex has about 10MB/s random 4k write on an unaligned partition, the Vertex LE is now doing 50MB/s. Random reads have gone from 35MB/s on my Vertex to almost 80MB/s on the latest Crucial C300s. So you may have to wait a bit longer, but the difference will be even more amazing when you switch.

Buy three. What are you afRAID of?

[tepples]

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.

Either you have a laptop, or you're afRAID to put more than one drive in a desktop PC. Maybe you need to RAID NewEgg and buy three SSDs. Or you can take a step back, realize that a half terabyte is a step toward some goal, and describe this goal. What do you plan to put on this 500 GB drive?

Re:Buy three. What are you afRAID of?

[bigstrat2003]

I need 500 GB drives because I currently run a 1 TB RAID 5 array. I don't need to get 500 GB total space (I have more crap than that anyway), it'd just be very impractical to build a 1 TB array using 160 GB drives. Granted, I probably wouldn't use RAID 5 because the drives aren't prone to random death like magnetic drives, but it would still be 6 drives to get the kind of capacity I want. That's a bit more than I'm willing to go along with.

As to goal... I tend to have a lot of software/game disc images, movies, and TV shows sitting around on my PC (both "very legit" and actually legit), and while I don't strictly need to have them all on the disk at once, I'm in love with the convenience of being able to pull anything up at a moment's notice. Like I said, I have a 1 TB array, and I'm using at least 600 GB of it right now.

Re:Buy three. What are you afRAID of?

[vlm]

Granted, I probably wouldn't use RAID 5 because the drives aren't prone to random death like magnetic drives

You must be pretty new to SSDs. My experience with old ones is they work great, until one random day they never work again, at all, with 100% data loss. Some people experience they "merely" fail to write but can still be read. It seems pretty random.

Hard drives at least some of the time fail gradually and sometimes making horrible noises or taking a long time to spin up.

SSDs, so far in my experience, pretty much define random death, although they're overall pretty reliable.

Re:Flat panel monitors all over again

[TheKidWho]

So are you trying to say that people are moving to SSDs for no reason?

and in some cases slower SSD's which are less expensive to make

Really? Are you sure about this statement? Or are you pulling numbers out of your ass? What makes you think they're cheaper? What if they actually are more expensive and not so big conspiracy?

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.

Except, LCDs are much cheaper than CRTs now?

Re:Price / Perfomance Question

[adisakp]

Price / GB compared to performance == not so good.

I just bought a drive from Newegg.com. They were selling the Dane-Elec repackaged Intel 80 GB drive (with a USB upgrade kit) for $150 -- under $2/GB.

It's a G1 Intel drive but it can do 35,000 read IOPS per second (only 3,300 write IOPS though). Still much better random performance than anything other than the G2 Intel.

The linear performance of the Intel drives isn't so great (movie ripping / etc) but if you know you're doing linear work, storing the linear data files on a Velociraptor (or even a fast 7200 RPM drive) turns out to be way more effective $$$/GB for your budget than any SSD.

Re:You're doing it wrong...

[moonbender]

Getting the best of both worlds would mean getting low latency access to bulk file metadata, as well. I don't even mean fancy stuff like tags or what have you; but it would be nice if file listings would appear instantly instead of just very quickly, ideally including the icon thumbnails for media data if you're browsing graphically, finding files (recursively) should be super fast, as well. None of this is easy to do without doing strange ninja stuff, though, if it's possible at all.