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10 years - "leading the way to the new storage frontier"

..........	Western Digital Solid State Storage - formerly SiliconSystems Western Digital Solid State Storage is a world leader in advanced storage technology engineered exclusively for the Enterprise System OEM market. The company's patented and patent-pending SiliconDrive™ technology meets the rigorous demands of applications in the military, networking, telecommunications, industrial, interactive kiosk and medical markets.	.
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2.5" SiliconDrives from Western Digital	...	SiliconSystems - addresses and links
		SiliconSystems, Inc. 26840 Aliso Viejo Parkway Aliso Viejo, CA 92656 USA tel:- +1 949 900 9400 fax:- +1 949 900 9500 email:- info@siliconsystems.com url:- http://www.siliconsystems.com	Western Digital news WD Solid State Storage Sales Offices SiliconDrives products overview - 1.8", 2.5", CF etc

see also:- SiliconSystems - editor mentions on STORAGEsearch.com

• editor's comments:- SiliconSystems is different to most other flash SSD oems in focusing on the high reliability part of the storage market (rather than the high performance segment). It aims at oems who traditionally have designed hard drives into embedded products. Its value proposition is that for long life products in difficult to access locations - the longer operating life of its SiliconDrives (compared to HDDs and other SSDs) - makes them a lower cost solution overall when you take into account service calls, replacement drives etc. I described that as a "type #4" application in my SSD market adoption model.
  
  In May 2008 - California based SiliconSystems opened its first office in the People's Republic of China. And its founder and CEO, Michael Hajeck, was selected as a regional finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the 2nd consecutive year.
  
  In August 2008 - SiliconSystems doubled the capacity of its miniature embedded USB SiliconDrives.
  
  In September 2008 - SiliconSystems announced faster versions of its 2.5" SATA / PATA SiliconDrives - with upto 50MB/s read / write speeds and the company became a founding member of the SNIA's Solid State Storage Initiative.
  
  In October 2008 - SiliconSystems contributed its SiliconDrive II Blade specification to the Small Form Factor Special Interest Group for the purpose of creating an official governing standard.
  
  In December 2008 - SiliconSystems published a significant whitepaper - NAND Evolution and its Effects on SSD Useable Life (pdf). Starting with a tour of the state of the art in the flash SSD market the paper introduces several new concepts (including write amplification and wear leveling efficiency) to help systems designers understand why current wear usage models don't give a complete picture.
  
  In - January 2009 - SiliconSystems announced that its SiliconDrive Blade has been selected as a "2008 Best Electronic Design" technology of the year winner in the embedded small form factor category. The awards are chosen by the editorial staff of Electronic Design magazine from announcements they have received during the year. Editor Bill Wong cited SiliconDrive Blade's innovative design as a necessary development in accelerating wide-spread adoption of SSDs in embedded systems.
  
  In March 2009 - SiliconSystems' VP of Product Planning, Gary Drossel - shared his SSD Bookmarks with readers of StorageSearch.com. And the company also announced it has shipped over 4 million SiliconDrives integrated with its SiSMART technology. SiliconSystems also said it will ship faster versions of its 2.5" and 1.8" SiliconDrives in the next quarter - with R/W speeds up to 100MB/s and 80MB/s respectively, and (SLC) capacity upto 128GB.
  
  Also in in March 2009 - Western Digital entered the SSD market by acquiring SiliconSystems for $65 million. Integration into WD begins immediately, with SiliconSystems now becoming known as the WD Solid-State Storage business unit, complementing WD's existing Branded Products, Client Storage, Consumer Storage and Enterprise Storage business units. WD has published a FAQs page about this acquisition.
  
  From the time when SiliconSystems first appeared on our SSD pages in 2004 it was clear that the company was talking in a different way to the rest of the market. Of the 4 main market segments which I identified for SSD market penetration (published 2005) - I mentioned SiliconSystems as the pioneer in "High Reliability DAS".
  
  Quoting from that article - "The customer value proposition of the High Reliability DAS SSD is that the interval between server failures will be extended by several years compared to HDD technology."
  
  In recent years the company has avoided being sucked along the alternative currents of the small form factor SSD market and stuck to its mission of designing SSDs which are sustainable for customers to own - as reliable replacements for hard drives. The company's acquisition by WD demonstrates that those principles are valued where it counts - in the eyes of the world's fastest growing hard disk maker.
  
  In June 2009 - Western Digital Solid State Storage announced that it has begun shipping its new SiliconDrive III SSD product family which includes 2.5" SATA and PATA and 1.8" Micro SATA products with target read speeds up to 100MB/s and write speeds to 80MB/s in capacities up to 120 GB.

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