During a press even earlier this week got a chance to talk to harddrive manufacturer Western Digital and of course we moved into Solid State Drives territory, but also the new storage interface SATA 6Gb/s. WD who know owns SSD company SiliconSystems are active on the SSD market, but so far only for only in the business segment. This situation will remain for the foreseeable future since we don’t expect any major increase in volume.
It made it perfectly clear, over and over, that WD does not enter markets where there are no significant sales volumes. It will hold off going retail until the market has grown large enough, according to WD’s standard.
Since it is holding off the launch of retail SSD products it makes perfect sense that it will also hold of any SATA 6Gb/s products for retail. It referred to the sobering results from some early reviews of SATA 6Gb/s in a desktop environment that failed to impress anyone
WD doesn’t seem to think SATA 6Gbps has anything to offer at the moment and even if this more due to the harddrive technology than the actual interface the conclusion is quite easy to draw, as long as it won’t enter the retail SSD market there is little reason to care for SATA 6Gbps.
WD is playing it cool and even if we can understand the reasoning, 2011 feels a bit late to start up the retail launch. We presume this is not set in stone, but it could be good to show some sparks before it really enters the market. We know for a fact that WD believes in the technology and keeps improving its Solid State constantly.
Currently WD is the harddrive company that is doing best and recently revealed a quarterly fiscal report with record results.
