WD Begins Shipping New SATA/ PATA SSDs

WD 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 suitable storage solution for embedded system and data streaming applications such as multimedia content delivery systems and data centre 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).

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"SiliconDrive III is the first example of how WD plans to productise 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 centre media appliances," said Michael Hajeck, senior vice president and general manager of WD's solid state storage business unit.