Conclusion

The SiliconEdge Blue SSD may be Western Digital's first attempt at producing a solid state drive for the PC, but don't let that fool you into thinking that Western Digital engineers don't know what they are doing. Solid state memory is merely a new storage medium. It doesn't change the basic focus of the industry, which is more capacity at faster speeds and lower costs. And when it comes to addressing those needs, Western Digital has tons of experience, and it shows.

Unlike many other SSDs, the Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue SSDs come in useful capacities of 64 GB up to 256 GB. They didn't bother with smaller capacities like 16 GB or 32 GB, and with good reason too. With a typical Windows 7 installation requiring about 16 GB of storage space, it doesn't make much sense to offer smaller storage capacities.

When it came to performance, the 256 GB SiliconEdge Blue SSD was a pretty sedate solid state drive. Our tests recorded its actual sustained read speed as 248 MB/s, which is just 2 MB/s shy of its maximum read speed. That put it at the lower-end of SSD performance as most SSDs deliver throughputs in the range of 270-280 MB/s. However, we should keep in mind that it was still 63% faster than the 10,000 RPM 600 GB Western Digital VelociRaptor at sustained reads.

Its write performance was a mixed bag. Compared to the Intel X25-M G2 (34 nm) SSD, it was much slower at small writes but on the other hand, it was much faster at large writes. This suggests that the SiliconEdge Blue has faster NAND flash memory but a much slower controller.

We confirmed this through the IOPS scaling tests. When we increased the number of outstanding I/Os, the SiliconEdge Blue couldn't keep up with the deluge and maintained the same level of performance. The Intel X25-M G2, on the other hand, could handle the higher number of transactions and thus reported much higher performance as the number of outstanding I/Os increased. On the other hand, the higher speed NAND flash memory used in the WD SiliconEdge SSD allowed it to beat the Intel X25-M in large writes (both random and sequential), by 40% and 80% respectively.

Overall, this is a good first effort from Western Digital - a fast, spacious solid state drive with excellent endurance characteristics (70 GB writes per day for 3 years). There's even an excellent 3 year warranty to back that up. Worth considering if you can afford the hefty price tag and don't mind the higher power consumption.

To find the lowest price for Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue solid state drives, click here!

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