Western Digital enters SSD market

Robert Hallock (Thrax)

March 30, 2009 3:00 PM ET in News, , , , , , , ,

western_digital_wdWhat do you do if you’re a manufacturer of mechanical hard disks for whom it would be a great deal of effort to shift gears into SSD production? Why you buy an SSD manufacturer, of course!

Western Digital has announced that it has acquired SiliconSystems Inc. in the pursuit of immediate solid state production. Here’s your boring press release:

LAKE FOREST, Calif. – Mar. 30, 2009 – Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC), a world leader in hard drive storage for computing and consumer electronics applications, today announced that it has completed a $65 million cash acquisition of SiliconSystems, Inc., Aliso Viejo, Calif., a leading supplier of solid-state drives for the embedded systems market.

Since its inception in 2002, SiliconSystems has sold millions of SiliconDrive® products to meet the high performance, high reliability and multi-year product lifecycle demands of the network-communications, industrial, embedded-computing, medical, military and aerospace markets. These markets accounted for approximately one third of worldwide solid-state drive revenues in 2008. SiliconSystems’ product portfolio includes solid-state drives with SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB and CF interfaces in 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch, CF and other form factors. SiliconSystems has developed extensive intellectual property to address the stringent embedded systems market requirements to ensure data integrity, eliminate unscheduled downtime, protect application data and software and provide for data security and protection through its patented and patent-pending PowerArmor®, SiSMART®, SolidStor® and SiSecure™ technologies.

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7 Comments:

  1. Yay! I'll be so happy when SSD becomes mainstream. I purchased a normal HDD this week and was so disappointed to see how bulky and heavy it is. Solid state is so much nicer.

  2. Do want SSD for my netbook!

  3. I'm thinking my next computer purchase will be an SSD for the X200. The hard drive is, at this point, what I believe is holding me back the most.

  4. I think I'm going to install my Apex in my Netbook. It's been kicking around on rails in my desktop, but I think that's a way better place for it.

  5. I think this bodes well for the future of SSD. A few things I have read have said that Windows 7 is going to have some drive management features that realy improve the way these perform. Better disk management tools, re writes without performance degradation, its all on its way. Killing hard drive noise and acess times is something I think we can all agree on and if Western Digital saw fit to invest in its future, it looks like they have faith that its a viable long term solution. Perhaps we are only another year or so from it being common place in new systems? Lets hope so.

  6. Completely unsurprising. The only noteworthy revelation is that it took them this long.

  7. Dear TRIM command,

    Please save us.

    Love,
    Robert

Troll-free since 2003 ®