There have been various rumors flying about Western Digital bringing a SSD to market.  I wanted to take a quick moment to clear the air on this before those rumors get out of hand.

Squashing Some Western Digital SSD Rumors - Storage 3

A few months ago, Western Digital acquired SiliconSystems.  The recently announced SiliconDrive III was on their roadmap prior to the acquisition.  This drive is geared toward the embedded system market and is not meant to be sold to the general public.  Think military applications, or for medical gear that does not play nice with large metal discs (i.e. MRI).  This drive has slower sequential transfer rates than other current SSD’s, and is meant to be more robust for in-the-field type applications.  There is also additional mechanisms at play to prevent data loss during noisy power / power loss conditions, as well as added self-monitoring and reporting capabilities.

Squashing Some Western Digital SSD Rumors - Storage 4

Long story short, this will be a very pricey and robust unit that favors extreme reliability over nosebleed speeds.  This level of hardening will simply be overkill for general PC use.  So yeah, they have an SSD, but it wont be on store shelves any time soon.