Final Thoughts
I’m sure you and almost everyone you know has a favorite hard drive manufacturer and when they are building a new system they will ONLY use those types of drives. Honestly I am more or less the same way. As I said in the introduction of this review we have seen so many solid state drives from memory companies not known for producing storage products. So if you are holding out on a solid state drive because of this then your wait is over because Western Digital’s SiliconEdge Blue solid state drive can compete with those drives and has the quality you expect from Western Digital.
The drive performed right up there with other solid state drives in all of the sequential read tests, which was impressive, but the write tests were not very good at all. It seemed the drive sort of decided to dive towards the end of some of the tests. You can really see what I mean in our HDTune write benchmark test. We ran these tests many times and got the same results. We even looked at other reviews to see if people got the same results and they did. We are not sure what is causing the write issue, but it does have an impact on overall drive performance.
Like most other solid state drives you still get the same set of great features the most important being TRIM support. Keep in mind you also have a 3 year warranty. One again this is a consumer level drive and not a performance drive, but there is no word if a SiliconEdge “Black” edition will be coming out anytime soon.
The 256GB version that we reviewed sells at my favorite online retailer for $499, which put it on par with other 256GB solid state drives, especially the Kingston SSDNow V-Series, which are based off the same controller. Overall ThinkComputers gives the Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue 256GB Solid State Drive an 8 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Very impressive read speeds
– Nice gunmetal casing
– Quality built
– 3-year warranty
Cons:
– Write speeds were a concern
