WD Enters Solid-State Drive Market With Aquisition of SiliconSystems

[btarunr]

Western Digital Corp., 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.

WD's storage industry leadership, worldwide infrastructure, and technical and financial resources will enable further growth in SiliconSystems' existing markets and customer relationships. SiliconSystems' intellectual property and technical expertise will provide additional building blocks for future products to address emerging opportunities in WD's existing markets.

"We are delighted to have the SiliconSystems team join WD," said John Coyne, president and CEO of WD. "The combination will be modestly accretive to revenue and margins as a result of SiliconSystems' existing position as a trusted supplier to the well-established $400 million market for embedded solid-state drives. SiliconSystems' intellectual property and technical expertise will significantly accelerate WD's solid-state drive development programs for the netbook, client and enterprise markets, providing greater choice for our customers to satisfy all their storage requirements."

Integration into WD begins immediately, with SiliconSystems now becoming known as the WD Solid-State Storage business unit, complementing WD's existing Branded Products, Client Storage, Consumer Storage and Enterprise Storage business units.

"WD's strong balance sheet, sales reach, and operations and logistics capabilities will allow us to greatly accelerate our penetration of our existing markets, while combining our engineering expertise with WD will enable us to develop new solid-state drives to broaden our overall product portfolio and address the emerging applications for solid-state storage in WD's existing customer base," said Michael Hajeck, a founder and CEO of SiliconSystems, now senior vice president and general manager of WD's Solid-State Storage business unit. "We are extremely excited to be joining WD and enabling an even stronger future for our talented team."

A set of questions and answers related to today's announcement can be found on WD's website

Source: WD

[MTnumb]

great. more competition on the SSD market=greater production=less $ per GB.
lets just hope they don't use the JMicron controller XD

[SpatialAnomaly]

NICE! Finally a SSD with a brand name I'd actually consider buying!

All they need to do now is make one with 1tb capacity, at the price of a 500GB platter HD, and I'll be all over it.

[mybestfriendskip]

This is great news!

WD will take over this segment with high quality SSDs....

[Homeless]

Can't wait till those 30gb SSD drives become a reasonable price

[moogle]

Originally Posted by SpatialAnomaly

NICE! Finally a SSD with a brand name I'd actually consider buying!

All they need to do now is make one with 1tb capacity, at the price of a 500GB platter HD, and I'll be all over it.

Yeah I agree I can't wait till they do start making those larger capacity drives and cheaper. Hell I wouldn't mind if they made them in 3.5" sizes as long as it was cheaper.

[DonInKansas]

Originally Posted by SpatialAnomaly

NICE! Finally a SSD with a brand name I'd actually consider buying!

All they need to do now is make one with 1tb capacity, at the price of a 500GB platter HD, and I'll be all over it.

I guess we'll see you in about 5-10 years then. By then, SSD will be old tech. It is good to see more competition in the market, that's for sure.

[moogle]

Originally Posted by DonInKansas

I guess we'll see you in about 5-10 years then. By then, SSD will be old tech.

Don't say that
I'm waiting on some big chunky SSD's too. To me it seems that they're moving quick because now we got faster and bigger drives and more and more users are buying them.

[hAKtivate]

Originally Posted by SpatialAnomaly

NICE! Finally a SSD with a brand name I'd actually consider buying!

All they need to do now is make one with 1tb capacity, at the price of a 500GB platter HD, and I'll be all over it.

To be honest I used to feel the same way. It seems like in the past 3 months I have had 3 WD HD's crap themselves (one of which was a 74gb Raptor, another I have had under a year, and the 3rd was MAYBE 2 years old). I used to recommend Western Digital to any of my friends that would ask. I dunno. Maybe I am a noob and somehow did it to them myself. Just sucks because I had backed up all my Pictures from past vacations to one hard drive (then it died), my music to another (then it died), and the third was just random storage space.

Side note, if anyone has a site they can link me to for tinkering with the internal workings of an HD i'd really like to try to either swap the PCB's with the HD controllers and see if I can salvage the hard drives or if it comes down to it even swap the platters from the old hard drive to a new one.

I have xfire - foebia
msn - denethor3@hotmail.com
aim - iflyuscg

Any help would be appreciated.

[Hayder_Master]

Originally Posted by MTnumb

great. more competition on the SSD market=greater production=less $ per GB.
lets just hope they don't use the JMicron controller XD

agree , company like WD make good challenge in prices

[BOSE]

SAWEET! About time WD jumped on the band wagon.