Western Digital buys solid state drive maker

After initially playing a bit of a wait and see game with solid state drives, suggesting an eventual entry in the low-end segment, Western Digital is now buying its way into the market by announcing the acquisition of SiliconSystems today. The $65 million all-cash deal sees the embedded systems specialist become Western Digital's solid-state storage business unit, and the expansion of the vendor’s business to include the network-communications, industrial, embedded-computing, medical, military and aerospace markets.

The company has plans beyond embedded products, of course. With access to SiliconSystems’ technology, which already includes SATA and IDE drives with 2.5 and 1.8-inch form factors, Western Digital says it is prepping SSDs for the netbook, client and enterprise markets. Integration into WD begins immediately, according to the official press release, so let’s hope to see some consumer oriented drives sooner rather than later.

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Good. With more competition on these SSD drives, hopefully it will drive down the prices. :)

Brink said:

Good. With more competition on these SSD drives, hopefully it will drive down the prices. :)

And up the speed/quality.

Thanks Aaron.

I'm not so sure that WD is the manufacturer I would have liked see get involved in this stuff.

It's a bit like Ferrari selling out to Ford or Daewoo.

However a bit lof competition is always good. Before even 1GB usb sticks were commonplace any body remember the old 512MB and 1GB IBM microdrives (they still work in card\ readers that can read CF cards BTW).

Hitachi took them over - price and quality suffered. Sandisk came along to restore the balance thank goodness -- but it shows take overs don't always mean a good deal for (to ? Eng ?) the consumer.

Cheers
jimbo

lol - I have like 6 or 7 of the 170 MB microdrives....

And sometimes it can be good, but sometimes....

Remember, WD made themselves a cornerstone in the HD market by buying out arguable the best HD manufacturers of hte early 90s - Conner.

Their quality might have gone up, and they earned a lot of points in hte reliability sector, but it was the Conner name that made the masses flood to them, especially in the desktop market - back in the day, I would not build a machine (and we're talking 486SX/25s to 486DX2/80s) unless I got my hands on Conner drives.