Now Western Digital enters the SSD market with SiliconSystems buyout

Last spring, Western Digital -- which duels with Seagate for top market share -- began pushing hard disk drives with very fast RPM speeds (20,000, versus the conventional 5,600 and 7,200 RPM) as a way of answering the challenge of solid-state drive technology. See, even though sustained transfer times for HDDs have surprisingly stayed competitive with SSDs (which are made of flash memory, after all), what's always impressive about SSDs are their seek times -- how fast they can access the first bit of data.

Meanwhile, catering specifically to the enterprise market, Aliso Viejo, California-based SiliconSystems had been countering WD and Seagate with an argument that truly does have some weight to it: the idea that mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) estimates for HDDs showing them more reliable than SSDs, didn't take real-world operating conditions into account.

"It is also important to note that the failure behavior of a drive depends on the operating conditions," reads a Carnegie Mellon white paper produced for SiliconSystems last year (PDF available here), "and not only on component level factors. For example, failure rates are affected by environmental factors, such as temperature and humidity, data center handling procedures, workloads and 'duty cycles' or powered-on hours patterns."

One of the white paper's most interesting conclusions: It's self-defeating to "linearize" failure rates for HDD media, since it may take a few years for the first failure of a drive to be recognized. Likelihood of any device to fail, as any engineer in almost any mechanical field will tell you, rises exponentially, not linearly.

Western Digital responded to that rather convincing argument today...by completing its purchase of SiliconSystems. This gives Western Digital a memory-based product for the first time, particularly in the enterprise line. That's because SiliconSystems' technology -- which now enters the WD arsenal -- includes such features such as sophisticated voltage detection circuitry, which aren't priced low enough for consumer-grade features just yet.

Just last November, in a statement that was first given a negative spin before it got inverted in an "oh, wait, we meant it the other way" fashion, WD SVP for Marketing Richard Rutledge famously told The Register, in response to a question about future SSD investments, "Western Digital enters markets that exist." Later, that statement was qualified to mean, of course, the SSD market may very well exist, and WD may be interested in entering that market the moment it does.

According to WD today, SiliconSystems' sales accounted for one-third of the SSD market in 2008 -- at the time of Rutledge's statement -- and WD's acquisition was worth $65 million.