WD Ships New SATA/PATA SSDs

Western Digital is now shipping its new SiliconDrive III SSD product family based on technology from its March acquisition of SiliconSystems. The company’s new products feature faster read and write speeds as well as increased capacities. The drives also offer mechanical scalability, making them ideal for embedded system and data streaming applications such as multimedia content delivery systems and data center media appliances.

The new SiliconDrive III SSDs include 2.5-inch SATA and PATA and 1.8-inch Micro SATA products. The drives offer native SATA 3.0Gbps or ATA-7 interfaces with target read speeds up to 100MBps and write speeds up to 80MBps in capacities up to 120GB.



"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."

To help achieve the desired performance and reliability, every SiliconDrive III product includes PowerArmor, SiSMART, and SolidStor technologies.