Western Digital launches its first SSD - SiliconDrive III

[WiCKeD]

WD® BEGINS SHIPPING NEW SATA/PATA SSDS FEATURING HIGHER SPEEDS AND CAPACITIES FOR EMBEDDED SYSTEMS AND DATA STREAMING APPLICATIONS
New Products Based on Third-Generation SiliconDrive Platform

LAKE FOREST, Calif. - June 16, 2009 - WD® (NYSE: WDC) today announced that it has begun shipping its new SiliconDrive® III SSD product family based on technology from its March 2009 acquisition of SiliconSystems. The company's new SiliconDrive III products feature faster read/write speeds and increased capacities, and offer mechanical scalability, making them a perfect storage solution for embedded system and data streaming applications such as multimedia content delivery systems and data center media appliances.

SiliconDrive III SSDs include 2.5-inch Serial ATA (SATA) and Parallel ATA (PATA) and 1.8-inch Micro SATA products featuring native SATA 3.0 gigabits per second (Gbps) or ATA-7 interfaces with target read speeds up to 100 megabytes per second (MBps) and write speeds to 80 MBps in capacities up to 120 gigabytes (GB).

"SiliconDrive III is the first example of how WD plans to productize solid state technology developed by SiliconSystems. The launch of SiliconDrive III will also enable WD to leverage its global sales and distribution channels to accelerate the adoption of SSD technology beyond SiliconSystems' traditional embedded systems OEM customer base into data streaming applications such as multimedia content delivery systems and data center media appliances," said Michael Hajeck, senior vice president and general manager of WD's solid state storage business unit. "SiliconDrive III is an ideal solution for OEMs that require increased performance, capacity, reliability and data throughput in their applications."

SiliconDrive III has been designed and optimized for high performance and high reliability in demanding 24x7 applications in the embedded systems, media appliance and data streaming markets. Performance and reliability is achieved through the integration of the company's patented and patent-pending advanced storage technologies in every SiliconDrive III product. The company's patented and patent-pending PowerArmor®, SiSMART® and SolidStor® technologies address critical OEM design considerations such as the elimination of drive corruption due to power anomalies, the ability to monitor a SiliconDrive's useable life in real-time and integrated advanced storage technologies that ensure data integrity and SSD life for multi-year product deployments. Web site at http://www.wdc.com/en/products/index.asp?cat=21.

Read the Press Release @ Western Digital

[Almost Tactf]

Have they been paying attention.....

with target read speeds up to 100 megabytes per second (MBps) and write speeds to 80 MBps

that completely blows and is half as fast as OCZ.......

[daredevil]

That also is the 'target' speed for ATA, not S-ATA... Read man, read!

[Nagoshi]

Originally Posted by Almost Tactf

Have they been paying attention.....



that completely blows and is half as fast as OCZ.......

It'S probably also half the cost, and might not have the stutter problems as cheaper SSD Their main target is OEM anyway, so people will think "SSD = fast", and they're not wrong anyway, cause even these "slower" SSD are still faster than HDD.

[Zer010]

I didn't see the life listed. IIRC SSDs have a finite amount of reads/writes before going bad, don't see the number listed.

[AruisDante]

Originally Posted by daredevil

That also is the 'target' speed for ATA, not S-ATA... Read man, read!

Ding ding ding.

It happens though AT Apparently SATA target speeds are full 3GB/s, although I'd find that VERY hard to believe

Originally Posted by Zer010

I didn't see the life listed. IIRC SSDs have a finite amount of reads/writes before going bad, don't see the number listed.

Practical lifespan for almost all NAND based flash devices is about 10,000 erase-writes. That's 27 years of filling the drive every day.

However, look at the intended applications. Non of them are targeted at operating system hosting. They're made to deliver large amounts of sequential data (aka media) at high speed. I'd imagine that they probably suffer from worse stutter than normal drives do.

[Almost Tactf]

Originally Posted by AruisDante

Apparently SATA target speeds are full 3GB/s, although I'd find that VERY hard to believe

Not a chance 24 Samsung SSD's in RAID0 barely break 2GB/s no way will they even get close I'd say 300MB/s TOPS and most likely a 250MB/s expectation would be more realistic

[AruisDante]

Originally Posted by Almost Tactf

Not a chance 24 Samsung SSD's in RAID0 barely break 2GB/s no way will they even get close I'd say 300MB/s TOPS and most likely a 250MB/s expectation would be more realistic

Sorry, that should have been Gb/s, so only 384 MB/s

[Almost Tactf]

I was hoping so even then that is a massive jump in speed!

[SSPrncVegeta]

FusionIO has yet to reveal their 1.5GB/s ioDrive Duo, due to be revealed two months ago.

[daredevil]

They will be launching this one soon http://www.fusionio.com/ioxtreme/performance.php not sure if that's what you're refering too but it's fairly quick.

[SSPrncVegeta]

I was referring to this one.

PERFORMANCE
Based on PCI Express x8 or PCI Express 2.0 x4 standards, which can sustain up to 20 gigabits per-second (Gbytes/sec) of raw throughput, the ioDrive Duo has more than enough bandwidth to obtain industry-leading performance from a single card. The ioDrive Duo can easily sustain 1.5 Gbytes/sec of read bandwidth and nearly 200,000 read IOPS. Its performance metrics are as follows:

• Sustained read bandwidth: 1500 MB/sec (32k packet size)
• Sustained write bandwidth: 1400 MB/sec (32k packet size)
• Read IOPS: 186,000 (4k packet size)
• Write IOPS: 167,000 (4k packet size)
• Latency < 50 µsec

[daredevil]

If I win the lottery I'll buy us both one!

[untrueparado]

wow $900. think of all those stuff i can buy instead of a pci-e card..

[Sephious]

Originally Posted by untrueparado

wow $900. think of all those stuff i can buy instead of a pci-e card..

I can tell you if I won the lottery that'd be the first thing I'd buy. Think of how ridiculously fast your PC would be with it. Before winning the lottery, I'd have a lot of things to buy first however

[justinsn95]

Originally Posted by AruisDante

Practical lifespan for almost all NAND based flash devices is about 10,000 erase-writes. That's 27 years of filling the drive every day.

Filling and completely erasing every day?

[AruisDante]

Originally Posted by justinsn95

Filling and completely erasing every day?

Well, it's kind of a given that if you're filling it you'll have to erase it to fill it back up again

[levathar]

I can't imagine the performance increase in a enthusiast PC.
I always heard that hard drives are the bottle necks.
Maybe XP would load in one second?