titleThe SSD market has grown in leaps and bounds over the past few years. It has given new names a chance to make a name for themselves. Strangely enough, the biggest names in the storage industry Western Digital and Seagate have been slow to the market, letting the technology mature before jumping in. With the purchase of SiliconSystems, Western Digital finally jumped in. Today we are looking at their SiliconEdge Blue, their first entry in the personal SSD market. To celebrate we will showcase this milestone in a custom case from Cooler Master and Smooth Creations.

Product Name: Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue 128gb

Review Sample Provided by: Western Digital

Review by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

siliconedgeblue_1

Specifications

Physical Specifications

Capacity

128 GB

Interface

SATA 3 Gb/s

Form Factor

2.5-inch Drive

RoHS Compliant

6/6

Performance Specifications

Target Performance

Interface Burst Speed

3 Gb/s

Sustained Read Speed

Up to 250 MB/s

Sustained Write Speed

Up to 170 MB/s

MTBF

1,400,000 hours

Error Rate (non-recoverable)

< 1 in 1015 bits read

Operational Lifespan

Read

Unlimited

Write

35 GB/Day

Physical Specifications

User Sectors Per Drive

250,069,680

Physical Dimensions

Height

0.40 Inches

Length

3.9 Inches

Width

2.75 Inches

Power Management

DC Input Voltage

5V

Read (Peak Watts)

2.00 Watts

Write (Peak Watts)

3.5 Watts

Sleep (Idle Watts)

0.60 Watts

Environmental Specifications

Shock

Operating Shock

1000 G, Half-sine, 0.5ms Duration, 50g Pk, MIL-STD-810F, Method 516.5, Procedure I

Temperature (Metric)

Standard Temperature (c)

0° C to 70° C

Non-operating

-55°C to 125°C

Humidity

Operating

8% to 95% Non-condensing

Altitude (English)

Operating

80,000ft, MIL-STD-810F, Method 500.4, Procedure II

Vibration

Operating

16.3gRMS, MIL-STD-810F, Method 514.5, Procedure I, Category 24

siliconedgeblue_2

Performance

We know Western Digital can make a fast hard drive, but with the SSD market being new it’s really hard to say how the numbers will pan out. To get our numbers I used CrystalDiskMark, HD Tune, and PCMark. Our price per Gb graph is using the most up to date prices from Newegg/Amazon to get the best idea of who gives the best value. Here are our results!

read

randomaccess

westerndigitalssd

pcmarkvantage

pricepergb

With a reading of 206.5 using HDTach the SiliconEdge wasn’t far behind Crucial’s offering. Of course HDTach has been known to read a little low so we complement its results with a run through CrystalDiskMark, with a Max read speed of 243 this drive is impressive. Its Write speed of 138.1 is a nice improvement over and hard disc, but is still a little lacking when compared to Intel’s offering. Random access has become a non-issue with SSD’s, the SiliconEdge received a .1 ms random access result just like the other SSD’s tested. Our last set of tests are a whole listing of tests that PCMark Vantage runs, with PCMark testing being new to our reviews you will have more to compare to in the future. But you can see that in most tests the test results are lower than our other tests, but still considerably higher than a standard disk drive performance numbers.

 

 

siliconedgeblue_3

siliconedgeblue_4

siliconedgeblue_5

 

Overall

Western Digital’s first consumer SSD performed well in our testing. Not only did it perform well but I also found the silver drive casing to be the best looking that we have currently tested. When putting together the Cost Pre GB chart I was surprised to find out that this is the best value out of all of the SSD’s tested. I think when put up against tougher competition the SiliconEdge Blue will come out a little short, but surprisingly it’s a better value per gig when compared to OCZ’s entry level drive. I can’t want to see what Western Digital will bring out in the future.

testdefalt-finalsilver

Author Bio
garfi3ld
Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org
Editor-in-chief
You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.

Log in to comment

We have 1814 guests and one member online

supportus