The Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue

Our 256GB sample SiliconEdge Blue arrived in brown box fashion, but I am confident WD will put together a great package for the retail units. Here we see the front of the drive. All of the information is listed on the front label. It is kind of nice to see the Product Of the USA statement on the drive; something we do not see very often.

I really like the finish of the drive. Even though it is in the Blue Series, it could easily pass as an industrial product. The metal case was very sturdy and offers a lot of protection. The bottom mounting holes are present so you will not have a problem mounting the SiliconEdge in most of the notebooks on the market.

On the side we also found the mounting holes where they should be.

The SATA power and data connections were also where they should be, making the Blue ready for just about any installation.

On the front side of the PCB we get a good look at the controller, DDR II Buffer and half of the flash. The Samsung flash is double stacked and we can see that there are a lot more little components on the board than a typical Indilinx Barefoot drive.

Here we see the Western Digital labeled controller and the massive 512MB buffer DRAM.

Samsung has been known to make very high quality flash memory. Western Digital didn't do any dumpster diving here.

On the back we see the rest of the flash. In a double stacked configuration that means there are 32 flash chips on the board for the 256GB model. Certainly these can't be cheap to build.