SiliconEdge Blue Overview
If you know anything about Western Digital you know that their “Blue” series of drives are their consumer-based drives and not a performance drive. This holds true with their SiliconEdge series, although there is no word if a “Black” version will be coming out anytime soon. The SiliconEdge Blue drives looks like most other solid state drives we have reviewed. It has the 2.5-inch form factor, but has a nice gunmetal aluminum casing, which is nice. On the front there is a sticker that has all of your important information on it.
The back of the drive is all plain, but does have 4 mounting holes. Just like all 2.5-inch solid state drives you have the normal SATA power and data connections.
To get into the drive you need to remove 2 screws on each side of the drive. Then you pop one side of the casing off. Once inside you can take a look at the PCB. It is actually upside down so you can only see the 8 MLC flash NAND chips. These chips are Samsung K9MDG08U5M 16GB chips.
If you remove 4 more screws you can take the rest of the PCB out. I actually noticed that the PCB is designed by Western Digital and has the name Pearl Rev 2. Flipping the PCB over and taking a look at the other side you can see the rest of the NAND chips. So you have 16 total, giving you 256GB of storage, but only 238GB will be usable. Now at first I thought Western Digital had come up with their own controller for this drive, but it is not so even though the chip has a Western Digital logo on it. From the research we have done and from what everyone else is saying this controller is the JMicron JMF612 controller. Sitting next to the controller is the ESMT 128MB cache chip that will help with the drives performance.
