Man, the consolidation efforts are really heating up. Just days after Cisco forked out
a small fortune to acquire Pure Digital, HDD mainstay
Western Digital has penned a check for $65 million in cold, hard cash in order to acquire SiliconSystems, Inc. Said outfit is an Aliso Viejo, California-based supplier of solid-state drives for the embedded systems market, and rather than wasting any more time falling behind in the
SSD realm, WD figured it prudent to just buy the technology it needed to position itself as a legitimate competitor. WD has already made clear that it hopes to sell SSDs for the netbook, client and enterprise markets, and given that integration will begin "immediately," we're hoping to see some shipping products sooner rather than later.
posted Mar 30th 2009 11:07AM
Price drops pleeeease :)
WD is the man, ive been using a 36 gig raptor for 4+ years now and swear by it, cant wait for their line of ssd's ... and in 2 years it will be affordable.
NICE!!!...
so SSDs gonna b cheaper now that we got some real competition going on.. WOOOT!!
HAIL TO THE HDDs!! even cheaper!!
imagine buyin now a 1tb hdd for 40 bucks??
how cool would that b?
You've added nothing.
Is this real competition?
I'm not an expert but from what I heard the problem with SSDs was that only one company (JMicron) makes cheap SSD controllers. Remove the 'cheap' from that line and there's still only two companies making controllers for consumer drives - JMicron and Samsung (plus Intel, who don't sell theirs). Not exactly a lot of competition there.
Maybe Silicon Systems actually make their own controllers and it's that expertise WD is hoping to bring to the consumer market in new products. Otherwise, I don't really see what this adds - i.e. will this just be the WD brand slapped on yet another SSD that's using the same JMicron/Samsung controller and the same (probably Samsung) flash memory as everyone else (and for approximately the same prices).
Don't forget the Indilinx controller. OCZ (Vertex), ADATA, and Super Talent use them. And most likely others we don't know about yet.
lol i thought WD hated SSD's and tried to make a super 20,000rpm drive
heh i stil love em
Well, they never did that.
i think he is speaking of the velociraptor.
10k and 15k RPM is perfectly reasonable to me. But I think he's referring to this rumor from June 2008:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/06/western-digital-developing-20-000rpm-raptor-to-take-on-ssds/
Quite the romantic idea... hard drives making their last desperate stand against the onslaught of SSDs. Too bad it never happened.
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2008/06/06/western-digital-working-on-20-000-rpm-raptor/1
Didn't WD quite recently assert that a consumer-centric SSD market did not exist?
http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/24/western-digital-does-not-believe-in-ssds-santa-claus/
That's quite a rapid change of tune. Like some of the other commenters, I've had good experiences with WD. I'll be happy to buy their SSD products when they're available and affordable.
Double speak (noun): Any language that pretends to communicate but actually does not. Commonly used by corporations and governments to beat the competition into the ground, typically for an opportune time to take them over.
funny as they used to "see no market in SSD's".
More big companies in on SSD action the better:)
The speeds are getting crazy fast now with the ocz vertex and intel drives, sata3 drives and pci-e flash drives are coming soon too:) Cant wait to buy a sata3 60gb+ SSD for £100, just gotta wait 6 months or so i reckon.
never heard of siliconsystems btw:(
WD still isn't in the consumer SSD market. Silicon Systems focuses on the embedded secure, high-reliability market, and their products are priced accordingly.
Article says:
"WD has already made clear that it hopes to sell SSDs for the netbook, client and enterprise markets".
I assume that they're going to use the acquired technology for this...
I was surprised that the other HD types didn't do this earlier, especially those not part of a bigger conglomerate (Seagate, really). As SSD technology gets better, HD market will forced into an ever-+more unprofitable niche, unless some new consumer application actually requires TBs of storage.
by the time that happens. SSDs will have caught up to HDDs in storage capacity.
Great! I really can't wait until SSD's get into the 1tb range and drop to affordable prices :)
I would be fine with an 120GB SSD for $120. Give me that and we'll call it a day.
I can use a HDD for storage and SSD to run my OS and application installs.
Somebody should wake up Seagate!
Oh man thats gonna be amazing! a 1TB SSD NAS *drool*
Hey guys, remember how awesome it was when our PS/2 model 30s had 16MB hard drives?
Guys?
my model 30 came with a 20MB drive :-)
WD probably did this almost exclusively for the IP portfolio, since the purchase appears to be expected to have a relatively insignificant impact on sales revenue.
"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."
never had a good WD harddisk.
almost all of mine failed in less than half a year, and unfortunately, along with all my data. Unless they prove reliable again, I would pay a bit more for Samsung or Hitachi SSDs.