Western Digital Enters World of Solid State

Vigile writes: The solid state disk market keeps crowding but the Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue SSD marks the first offering from a player that currently dominates the market of traditional spindle-based hard drives. It was a year ago this month that WD purchased SiliconSystems for $65m, a small enterprise level SSD vendor that has developed its own storage controller. Western Digital obviously made the move to prepare the company for the inevitable situation it finds itself in today: solid state has surpassed traditional media in performance and will likely soon become the mainstream storage choice for computers. PC Perspective has put the first consumer-level SSD option from one of the kings of HDDs through the wringer and found the drive to be a solid first offering with performance on par with the some of the better solutions in the market while not quite fast enough to take away the top seating offerings from Intel and others. Western Digital has seen the writing on the wall; the only question is when the other players in the hard drive market will as well.