WD splashes $65 million for slice of the SSD pie
by Stevie Smith - Mar 31 2009, 15:45
$65 million USD buys WD a place at the solid-state table. Image: SiliconSystems.
Prominent hard drive maker Western Digital Corp. (WD) has this week seemingly set its sights firmly on the ever-expanding solid-state drive (SSD) market following the acquisition of California-based SSD specialist SiliconSystems Inc.
More pointedly, Lake Forest-based WD has taken possession of a technology outfit that has sold million of its SiliconDrive products to meet the demands of industries such as network-communication, embedded-computing, medical, military and aerospace – which accounted for one third of worldwide SSD revenues during 2008.
With the $65 million USD deal now completed, WD receives a device portfolio crammed with solid-state solutions covering SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB and CF interfaces in 2.5-inc and 1.8-inch form factors, outlined the company in an official release.
“We are delighted to have the SiliconSystems team join WD,” trumpeted WD president and CEO John Coyne. “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.”
Coyne added that the newly acquired intellectual properties and technical expertise available through SiliconSystems will enable WD to “significantly accelerate” its own SSD development programs for areas such as Netbooks while providing customers with greater choice and satisfaction regarding their data storage requirements.
Some of those newly acquired exclusive properties include storage failure protection via PowerArmor Technology, advanced monitoring applications courtesy of SiSMART, and ECC algorithms, wear-levelling, bit-flip error elimination, data transfer and data integrity through SolidStor.
Integration of SiliconSystems is to begin immediately and the company will now trade as the WD Solid-State Storage business unit alongside existing WD divisions such as Branded Products, Client Storage, Consumer Storage and Enterprise Storage.
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