Western Digital Announces Shipping of New SiliconDrive III SSD Product

Western Digital (News - Alert) (WD), a leading manufacturer of external storage drives, has announced it has begun shipping its latest entry to the market, the SiliconDrive III SSD product family.

 

The platform, which was designed to offer faster read/write speeds and increased capacities enabling a wide range of markets and applications to benefit from WD's advanced solid state storage technology, was built on the expertise the company received as part of its acquisition of SiliconSystems.

 

WD provides products and services for people and organizations that collect manage and use digital information.

 

The SiliconDrive III SSD product line consists of 2.5 inch SATA (Serial-ATA) drive, 1.8 inch Micro SATA drive and 2.5 inch PATA (Parallel-ATA) drive all built on the SATA 3Gb/s interface with maximum read/write speeds up to 100/80 MB/s and capacity range of 30 GB to 120 GB.

 

According to WD, it offers a wide array of patented and patent-pending silicon-level, system-level and firmware-level technologies to ensure its SiliconDrive products deliver industry-leading data integrity. These include: best-in-class advanced Error Correction Code algorithms; patented wear-leveling technology; bit-flip error elimination and an innovative data refresh technology.

 

Michael Hajeck, senior vice president and general manager of WD's solid state storage business unit, said that SiliconDrive III will serve as model to demonstrate how WD is planning to productize solid state technology developed by SiliconSystems. WD will also be able to leverage its global sales and distribution channels through the launch of SiliconDrive 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.

 

Solid state storage solutions deployed by OEMs need to last five to 10 years, or more, and perform in every type of usage model and environment. WD claims that its SiliconDrive III can offer users high performance, high reliability, high endurance, a true drop-in hard drive replacement and mechanical scalability with no performance compromises.

 

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.

 

Western Digital recently joined the nonprofit consortium Green Grid and released its monster 4TB hard drive.