Although Solid State Drives have been slowly but surely gaining momentum, traditional hard disk storage manufacturers have been reluctant to make their entrance into this market, Western Digital being the first such producer to release an SSD, the WD SiliconEdge Blue that we are going to take a look at today.

Available in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities, the latter model being the one that made its way into our testing labs thanks to ELKOTech, the SiliconEdge SSDs retain the naming scheme used by Western Digital for its hard drives, the Blue moniker being used to describe a drive that targets mainstream PC users, so don't expect this to be a speed demon since WD still has the Black label left to use for its fastest SSD solution (although that hasn't hit the market just yet).

That being the case, Western Digital decided to market the SiliconEdge Blue differently then the competition, choosing to emphasize its increased compatibility and reliability and not the its raw speed.

While that may sound just like a marketing gimmick to you, I can assure you this is not the case since compatibility issues have plagued SSD drives for a while now.

Although I am not talking about “it won't work” situations, there are a lot of systems (notebooks especially) that don't play nice with SSD drives, revealing all sort of weaknesses in their designs, that usually leads to a much slower experience then expected, this being exactly the kind of situation that Western Digital wants to prevent.



The main problem, when it comes down to compatibility, is that most SSD manufacturers are actually rather small companies that don't have the resources (either money, time or hardware) to test their drives on a wide range of configurations, Western Digital preventing this situation by using their very own Functional Integrity Testing (FIT) Labs that tests compatibility with different host systems, peripherals, host adapters, operating systems, application program and application systems.

Reliability wise, Western Digital claims the SiliconEdge Blue can stand up to 70GB writes per day, a bold claim indeed considering that during its three years warranty this would add up to about 73TB of writes, besting most consumer SSDs available, including Intel's future G3 X25 drives.

So, lets not waste any more time and dive right in into WD's SiliconEdge Blue specifications and performance numbers to see if this is indeed an SSD that is worthy of our monthly pay check or not.