Western Digital Gets Into SSD Game

Western Digital If you’ve been wondering when Western Digital would jump into the Solid State Drive (SSD) market, wonder no more. Today, Western Digital announced that they would be buying SiliconSystems, Inc. for $65 million (USD). SiliconSystems, Inc., currently supplies SSDs for embedded systems, including in both 1.8″ and 2.5″ IDE/PATA and Serial ATA (SATA) form factors.

SiliconSystems will become the “WD Solid-State Storage Business Unit”, and WD considers this important in regards to the future of their netbook offerings:

“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.”

WD is a popular choice in the laptop HDD market, especially for their 320GB and 500GB offerings. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes, since 2009 and 2010 are shaping up to be the year(s) for SSDs to really take off when it comes to size and speed.

Read:
Press Release (Western Digital)
Western Digital – Questions and Answers for Investors
CNET
Orange County Business Journal