Western Digital, a leading maker of the traditional hard drive, supposedly felt a little out of the loop as they still hadn’t really caught on to the solid-state disk bandwagon. Instead of playing a long game of catch-up, they simply forked out $65 million in cold cash and bought the technology they needed in the form of the aptly-named SiliconSystems, Inc. SiliconSystems has been making millions of SSDs for embedded systems for the past several years and will find a nice new home after integrating into the Western Digital Empire, henceforth being known as the “WD Solid-State Storage business unit.” Since they’re combining forces “immediately,” here’s to bigger and better SSDs in the near future.
I’m a big fan of WD, bought hundreds of IDE and SATA I/II drives over the years. Got burned by an IBM deathstar and a Seagate barracuda before moving to WD.
Since then, the only drives that have died are the ones i’ve pulled apart. The WD IDE drive from the first computer i built with my own money as a teen is still running close to a decade later.
Lets hope they can get the same quality into the SSD market.
Edited 2009-03-31 03:01 UTC
I agree, I’ve never had anything but great experiences with WD drives no matter which models, and I’ve used just about all of them at one point or another. I don’t buy any other brand of hard drives myself, it’s all wd as far as I’m concerned.
Glad to see they’ll be getting into the ssd business, but hopefully we get more out of this than wd ssds. We need improved controllers as well, ones that use less power and are designed to have hardware wear-leveling, as ssds if not maintained properly can have a much shorter life span than a traditional hdd.
I can concur there. I’ve been using some of WD’s ‘Green’ 1TB drives recently, and they’ve been pretty excellent especially in a RAID array. The only other hard drive manufacturer I have given house room to has been Samsung within desktops, and they’ve also been pretty good to me over the years.
They’ve had some crappy models have WD, but less than most.
Too bad that SSD devices are slower (random writes), lower life span, hugely expensive and big question marks over whether there is actually any real battery life saved given the fact that one is still reliant on a batter sucking controller.
Your facts are a bit behind the times. As far as the random writes problem stands, there are newer devices on the market that have found that alleviate that problem.
Check the OCZ Apex or Patriot Warp V4.
The lower life span is arguable as that depends on the use of either SLC or MLC and the wear-leveling algorithms, which have improved considerably in the last few years.
I don’t have hard facts on the battery life but, if you’re using it in a portable, the shock resistance is so far beyond any hard disk that a shorter usage life
is worth it.
I’ve had 2 notebook drives die after a drop of about 18 inches. I had a Thinkpad with the shock-detection
that worked great to prevent disk damage except that
the system would freeze momentarily on every bump ( riding the bus on a rough route ).
With my SSD, I can toss the laptop from hand to hand without interrupting a program load or a data transfer.
The price does have to come down, though – a lot.
The Apex is sooo yesterday SSD
check the OCZ Vertex with latest firmware.
Back to subject … also a fan of WD drives. But it’s hard to imagine that regular hard drives will survive SSD in the long term. So I am glad they are moving on the SSD realm.
Is the Vertex the same design as the G.Skill Titan?
I believe they both try to alleviate the stuttering
by doing an internal RAID with dual JMicron controllers
From the little that I’ve read about these, the G.Skill
model had better firmware unless you’re implying that
OCZ has recently improved theirs even more.
No way, the Vertex uses the new Indilinx controller… No JMicron at all
They appear to be very good. There’s a very lively ssd community on http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=186
Happy reading!
I think that depends a great deal on how cost-effective ssds ultimately become, and how much capacity they ultimately will have. Right now, for most people, a worth-while ssd is not cost-effective. I’ve no doubt the prices will come down, as they’ve already come down significantly just in the past year or so, but whether they completely replace hard drives or not will depend on their cost per gb and how their capacities measure up.
Looks neat but the problem is with the OCZ Vertex is that it requires Windows if you want/need to update the firmware – that pretty much leaves me in the lurch when it comes to using it in my laptop.
It is still expensive though, NZ$491 for a 60GB drive, that is atleast twice the price and lacking the ability to upgrade the firmware in Mac or even being offered a booktable ISO.
IIRC you can just download the vista restore dvd, and boot up from that. But you might check the forum for more info (see some posts higher up)
Unless SSDs drop dramatically in price, I’ll keep using raided SSDs for a boot drive and a bunch of LARGE raided hdds for storage.
Can’t say that I am a fan of WD at all. I have a box of dead WD drives in the basement plus some still working. I expect most HDs to last about 3 years and not much longer. I prefer Maxtor (now Seagate) myself, but in years past those were also lots of trouble. Samsung is the worst, 30 days life on a recent TB drive, and its RMA replacement also got a fews days before the click of death occurred.
Fundamentally the HD is a terrible technology that pretty well works on pixie dust, the more you know about their internals, the more they shouldn’t work. SSDs are at least based on straight forward chip technology but with known wear mechanisms so thats a lesser set of issues. As a chip guy I can only expect SSD storage to become much more reliable and follow Moore’s law for awhile longer, it doesn’t have to catch up to HD in size, just be big enough for most basic installs.
If only the OSes would not get so bloated that they force the use of increasingly large HDs we could have the OS and immediate work in SSD and the rest on HD only if needed.
Anyway the WD SSD purchase has nothing to do with HD as far as quality is concerned so I expect to see a small price drop and ramp up of volume and hopefully more choices in smaller sizes below 32GB would be nice. Ironically Samsung is the huge player in SSD too, even if their HDs are terrible.
Today I can get a crappy performing 8GB SD card for about $15 that can just about install OS X on it, but needs a CD to actually boot into. The SSD drives proper are about 2x the price per GB and seem to start at 32GB and near $100. I look forward to seeing smaller parts at near linear prices. If 8GB or 16GB SATA SSDs showed up I would probably use them for most of my PCs for reliability, silence, and cost. Most of them don’t need any more storage anyway, and if they do, HDs are fine for media, archive etc stuff.
Me too. I have a stack of them in my kitchen cupboard. All WD. All prematurely dead. And it’s not that I stack the WD drives all in one place. It’s that those are the ones that die.
Me too. 🙂 Except that I have had almost no trouble whatsoever with Maxtors. And what trouble I have had has been after a long enough service life that I can’t complain.
I idly asked a sales guy at Best Buy (yeah) the other day which drives they had the most returns on. Unsurprisingly, and unhesitantly, he responded “Western Digital”.
W-D is C-R-A-P, IMO.
Ugh, no thanks. I’ve never had anything but trouble with Maxtor and Seagate. All Maxtor drives I’ve bought have either been dead on arrival or have given me the clik of death within a few months. I’ve had better luck with the notorious Death Stars, to be honest. Contrast that with my wd experience, I’ve never had one prematurely die and I’ve still got a couple that are over ten years old still kicking, and they’ve been heavily used. Think I’ll stick with wd, or possibly Samsung, as I know several people who’ve had very good experience with their Spinpoint series drives.
There is something going on here, I suspect, that goes beyond simple random sampling error. I’m not sure what it is. But putting mine and transputer_guy’s stacks of dead WDs against others’ gushing testimonials… it seems like there must be a deeper story to be discovered.
Yeah, I’ll give you the ending: hard drives die. Fact of life.
I have ~10 year old HDDs from Maxtor, Seagate, WD, and Quantum that still work really well. I also have had brand new Maxtor, Seagate, and WD drives that have died within weeks or a few months of use. So I doubt there is any conspiracy, maybe just a bad batch every so often. It happens.
Gee fella’s I have had major problems with segate Maxtor and WD previously in till I learned the importance of MTBF.
I only buy the enterprise disks like ES2 shame I cant get them in 250GB capacity any more.
All consumer drive’s ie cheep are crud for most of us.
Wouldn’t it be great to find out which brands/types of hard drives do live longer..
Unfortunately it’s always the same song, person A: “Oh I’ve had nothing but trouble with Brand X, only thing I’ll ever buy is Brand Y,” person B: “You’re kidding, I’ve got a box full of dead Brand Y drives, give me Brand X (or perhaps brand Z)”
I’d like to hear some vendor and type-specified stats by Google or something.