- Monday, 9 November 2009
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Money will buy a fine dog, but only kindness will make him wag his tail
WD goes shopping for SSD
WESTERN DIGITAL today announced it'll splash $65 million to buy up Silicon Systems, an embedded SSD manufacturer jumpstarting its SSD business.
Silicon Systems has been a provider of embedded SSD storage since its creation in 2002 and will immediately become WD's SSD arm. That's quite apparent if you look up the website links for investors and press. The deal is to go through right away and almost all 100 Silicon Systems employees are expected to have their buttocks branded with "WD" by day's end.
WD had been lacking a SSD strategy and, despite claiming it was a necessary step, hadn't come up with any concrete plans to develop its own kit, much to the chagrin of its stockholder volk.
Now this acquisition sounds like a two-pronged attack... it should give WD a serious foothold in the SSD business, and the opportunity to move into the enterprise and consumer businesses at a moment's notice.
WD stated the embedded SSD market was worth $400 million, of a grand total $1.1 billion in 2008. With double-digit growth expected throughout 2009, no-one can afford to be left out.
Right now Seagate is the only one without a recognisable SSD face, while it's still playing catch-up in the 2.5-inch HDD market. All its competitors – Samsung, Hitachi and now WD – have come up with SSD solutions, so it's anyone's guess what's holding them back.
Maybe we should send them knocking at Pliant Technology's door? µ
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SSD's won't hit mainstream till next year. Currently Western Digital doesn't need a marketable SSD until next year, there is simply no need to invest in a technology that won't be big till 2010-2011. So by buying this company this will allow them to develop their own SSD within a years time; it won't be perfect but it should be a marketable SSD. I would have figured Western Digital would have bought a DRAM maker such as Gskill, OCZ, ect.
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I agree, the DRAM makers have a pretty good hold here, why dont they make the drives?
When you buy Intel SSDs you buy SAMSUNG, no lie.
An SSD isn't only it's memory but the controller. So far the best controller available is made by Intel (and used only on their range) followed by Samsung, Indilinx (a startup made by Samsung ex-employees) and JMicron (which is used by most cheap SSDs and in general terms suck). The controller manages the latencies and bandwidth of the SSDs making them usable as hard drives.
There is a very enlightening article in anandtech about SSDs on the subject: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531