WD Ships Its First SSDs for Consumer Devices

Western Digital, which recently shortened its corporate identity to WD, said March 3 that it has begun shipping its first line of consumer-oriented SATA (serial ATA) solid-state drives.

WD said that the new 2.5-inch SiliconEdge Blue drives use a native 3G-bps SATA interface to perform at a sustained read speed of 250MB per second, compared with about 100MB per second for WD's fastest 2.5-inch hard disk drive, the Scorpio Black.

But that's not unexpected; all SSDs feature much faster read speeds than HDDs. The SiliconEdge Blue also represents a major improvement from WD's best high-performance desktop HDD, the Caviar Black, which reads at about 140M bps.

The SiliconEdge Blue drives also offer write-transfer rates of up to 170M bps, WD said.

The new SSDs, designed for high-end laptop and notebook computers, are available in capacities of 64GB, 128GB and 256GB. Because they have no moving parts, the SSDs inherently have a high tolerance for drops, shock and vibration and operate silently with low power requirements.

Pricing and Availability

SiliconEdge Blue SSDs are available now through select WD distributors and resellers at the following prices: 64GB, $279; 128GB, $529; and 256GB, $999. For more information, go here.