What happened to WD embedded solid state storage products?

We’ve had many inquires at Cactus over the past several months about what happened to Western Digital (WD) Embedded Solid State Storage products, since the Cactus Technologies Industrial Grade Flash Storage products are direct replacements for them.

Upon further investigation we found WD made the high level decision to close their embedded solid state storage group to focus efforts on development and marketing of world class client and enterprise SSD solutions. This is an enormous market and a fitting pursuit for a multi-billion dollar corporation such as WD.

Many of WD’s customers received an embedded solid state product discontinuation notice early this year with a Last-Time-Buy of August 15, 2013 and a final ship date of November 15, 2013. As of December 2013, there is no longer a readily available supply of these parts.

The WD embedded solid state storage products discontinued cover several product families each of which has a corresponding Cactus Technologies product family with similar or greater specifications.

The WD SiliconDrive II family of IDE/PATA Interface Compact Flash (CF), based on SLC NAND flash memory, is easily replaced by the Cactus Technologies 303 Series Industrial Grade Compact Flash cards. We have a Western Digital Cross Reference to assist with the conversion of this popular product.

The WD SiliconDrive A100 family of SATA II 3 Gb/sec embedded SSD devices ranging from 2.5” SATA SSD, mSATA, CFast and Slim SATA (aka MO-297) is easily replaced by the Cactus 900S family of SATA II devices.

Finally, the WD SiliconDrive U100 family of USB 2.0 eUSB embedded solid state storage devices is able to be converted to the Cactus 100 Series USB Disk-On-Module. While WD used the term eUSB (embedded USB) and Cactus uses USB Disk-On-Module, they are identical from a specification point of view.

We are at your service to discuss any specific requirement you may have regarding this WD discontinuation. Let us know if you would like to, "Talk to a Cactus Expert."

Steve Larrivee has over 30 year's experience in the data storage market, including 5 years at Seagate Technology and 10 years at SanDisk. He joined Cactus Technologies Limited as an equity partner and Co-Founded Cactus USA in 2007 with partner Tom Aguillon. Learn more about Steve on LinkedIn.