Western Digital Introduces SiliconDrive III SSD Series [WD Self-branded SiliconDrive III Solid State Drives]

Western Digital have just entered the Solid State Drive field with their first self-branded SiliconDrive III series. The new 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch SiliconDrive III SSD range uses the (recently acquired) SiliconSystems technology and runs at 100MBp read speeds and 80MBps write speeds.

Another interesting addition is that the drives feature the SiSMART technology that monitors the drives in real time, shows the remaining lifespan and alerts of possible failures. Meant for ultraportables, notebooks and certain servers, the WD SiliconDrive III SSDs are available from 30 to 80GB capacities, but there’s no word on availability and pricing yet.

Check out the full press release below

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 24 x 7 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.