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.