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Review: Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue 128GB

Disruptive new technologies tend to make established players look fl at-footed. So it was that a small Californian company called Tesla beat mighty and historic brands including Porsche and Ferrari to market with the first pukka electric sports car. It's the same story when it comes to SSDs. A dozen drives from seven manufacturers make up our Supertest this month, but only the SiliconEdge Blue comes from a traditional hard drive maker, namely Western Digital. Of course, when you think about it that makes perfect sense. Technologically speaking, spinning magnetic platters and NAND flash memory chips share little in common. Still, that hasn't stopped WD from cashing in on its well-earned reputation for reliability with the SiliconEdge Blue, its first mainstream consumer SSD. Instead of shouting about monster peak performance numbers, WD is emphasising ruggedness, reliability and rigorous data integrity. To that end, the Blue has automatic error correction and advanced wear-levelling. It also supports the Windows 7 TRIM, which is pretty much a given at this price point. As for performance, the synthetics look solid enough in terms of sequential read and write performance. Solid performance The 4k random throughput is a little off the pace at around 10MB/s – not that it seems to hurt application performance. The Blue tears through our file decompression and game level load tests near-as-dammit as quick as any other drive. Overall, this offering seems like a solid drive at a fair price. It just doesn't do anything to mark itself out from the competition.Related LinksTechRadar Reviews GuaranteeRead more storage reviewsRelated StoriesReview: Corsair Force F100 100GBReview: Iomega MiniMax 1TBReview: Iomega eGo Mac Edition 1TBReview: Intel X25-M G2 160GBReview: OCZ Vertex 2 100GB

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