Internals, Testing Methodology and System Setup
Internals:   

Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue 256GB SSD Review - WD enters the SSD market - Storage 38 

The brushed metal casing is if anything *too* protective.  It took me longer than usual to crack this one open :).

Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue 256GB SSD Review - WD enters the SSD market - Storage 39Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue 256GB SSD Review - WD enters the SSD market - Storage 40

Once freed from its enclosure, we see this new drive employs a typical SSD layout.

Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue 256GB SSD Review - WD enters the SSD market - Storage 41

A Western Digital branded controller sits aside 256MB of Elite Semiconductor DDR2-800 SDRAM.
Samsung dual-stacked, toggle-mode flash memory performs storage duties.

Testing Methods   

Our tests are a good mix of synthetic and real-world benchmarks.  PCMark, IOMeter, HDTach, HDTune, Yapt and our custom File Copy test round out the selection to cover just about all bases.  If you have any questions about our tests just drop into the Storage Forum and we’ll help you out!   

Test System Setup   

We have switched our testbed over to a more dedicated, forward thinking machine.  We made some changes to help minimize test data scatter with higher bandwidth devices.  Sound is flat out disabled, with no additional card installed.  Video was *intentionally* shifted to a PCI unit to free up both PCIe-16 slots for testing tandem pairs of PCI Express cards (like ioDrivesDDRDrives, and high end RAID cards).  Spot checks against the previous rig showed a negligible change in test output.   

PC Perspective would like to thank ASUS, Corsair, and BFG for supplying some of the components of our test rig.   

Hard Drive Test System Setup
CPU Intel Core i7 920 @ 4 GHZ (HT disabled)
Motherboard Asus P6T
Memory Corsair Dominator 6GB DDR3-1600
Hard Drive G.Skill 32GB SLC SSD
Sound Card N/A
Video Card BFG Geforce 8400 GS 512MB PCI
Video Drivers Geforce 181.22
Power Supply Corsair CMPSU-650TX
DirectX Version DX9.0c
Operating System Windows XP X64 SP2 
Windows 7 X64 (for TRIM testing)

  • PCMark05
  • Yapt
  • IOMeter
  • HDTach
  • HDTune   
  • PCPer File Copy Test

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