Joining the league of storage vendors like Seagate, Intel and Samsung, which have been offering solid state drives (SSDs) for a long time now, Western Digital marked its foray into the SSD arena with the Wednesday announcement of the WD SiliconEdge Blue – the company’s first SSD for consumers.

Western Digital’s new line of 2.5-inch SiliconEdge Blue SSDs use a SATA 3GBps interface; and their design is similar to the regular hard drive of a laptop, thereby implying that the drives can be swapped.

Boasting 170MBps write speeds and 250MBps read speeds, the SiliconEdge Blue SSDs will be available in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities, which will respectively cost $279, $529 and $999.

As per the WD claims, the new SSDs will be hardy enough to offer the best possible tolerance for drops, shock, and vibration. Furtheremore, though these SSDs will operate as silently as other SSDs, they will be more power-efficient than regular hard drives.

Noting that the SiliconEdge Blue SSDs meet the industry’s utmost standards of data integrity, compatibility, and reliability, WD elaborated that the SSDs, based on the company’s new multilevel cell flash technology, have successfully passed its extensive functional integrity tests - wherein the company subjects a drive to over 250,000 hours of testing.