Western Digital, one of the world’s largest makers of hard disk drives that recently acquired solid-state drive specialist SiliconSystems, on Tuesday released its first-even own-brand solid-state drives (SSDs) called SiliconDrive III, which continue the traditions of SiliconSystems and are not intended for consumers.

SiliconDrive III SSDs include 2.5” Serial ATA (SATA) and Parallel ATA (PATA) and 1.8” Micro SATA products featuring native Serial ATA-300 or ATA-7 interfaces with target read speeds up to 100MB/s and write speeds to 80MB/s in capacities from 30GB to 120GB. The storage solutions are aimed at embedded system and data streaming applications such as multimedia content delivery systems and data center media appliances. WD’s SiliconDrive III SSDs consume maximum 1.5W during reads, 2.0W during writes and 1W in standby mode (may vary depending on the model).

“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 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. 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.

WD promises that the SiliconDrive III has operational lifespan for writes for 20.8 years at 1582GB/day.

Tags: Western Digital, SSD, SiliconSystems, SiliconDrive, WD