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Brand-Name SSD Drives vs OEM-Rebranded Disks
Mar/31/09 23:27 Filed in: SSD Hardware
On Monday March 30, 2009 - Western Digital acquired solid-state disk drive maker SiliconSystems for $65 million. WesternDigital - the current market leader in 2.5-inch computer disk drives now has a way into the growing SSD market. SiliconSystems makes SSD products for communications, industrial, embedded systems, medical, military, and aerospace. SiliconSystems' acquired product lineup includes solid-state drives with a variety of interfaces, including SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB, 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch, and Compact Flash.
There was a time in the traditional hard disk drive industry when there were many players: Kalok, Quantum, Maxtor, Micropolis to name but a forgotten few that vanished, were acquired, or simply became a leveraged brand name. Spinning platter drive companies have been basically reduced down to the Big Four: Hitachi, Western Digital, Seagate and Samsung.
In the Solid-State Drive market you have very different players: the few MEMORY and CONTROLLER CHIP manufacturers around the globe where the guts of what's inside SSD are spec'd by a hanful of companies Intel, Micron, Samsung, and Indilinx. In exemplum, Samsung seems happy to OEM to lesser but recognizable brands. Intel SSD's are being rebranded by Kingston Memory and A-Data - but it's moot if they don't have a lower street price than Intel's. So what's the point there?
There'll be ruthless fallout and consolidation to come, great SSD's, mediocre performing SSD's, grey-box generic SSDs with the same guts as 'The Brands You Know - And Trust". And the difference between the OEM SSD and the Popular brands may only be in the packaging, marketing, and depth and length of warranty. The solid-state disk market is like it's hard platter drive counterpart - SOLID-STATE STORAGE ALREADY IS AND WILL BE A MASSIVE COMMODITY MARKET - that will inevitably have razor-thin margins but become a billion-ssd-drives-per-year industry where there's plenty of razor-thin slices of pie to go around.
There was a time in the traditional hard disk drive industry when there were many players: Kalok, Quantum, Maxtor, Micropolis to name but a forgotten few that vanished, were acquired, or simply became a leveraged brand name. Spinning platter drive companies have been basically reduced down to the Big Four: Hitachi, Western Digital, Seagate and Samsung.
In the Solid-State Drive market you have very different players: the few MEMORY and CONTROLLER CHIP manufacturers around the globe where the guts of what's inside SSD are spec'd by a hanful of companies Intel, Micron, Samsung, and Indilinx. In exemplum, Samsung seems happy to OEM to lesser but recognizable brands. Intel SSD's are being rebranded by Kingston Memory and A-Data - but it's moot if they don't have a lower street price than Intel's. So what's the point there?
There'll be ruthless fallout and consolidation to come, great SSD's, mediocre performing SSD's, grey-box generic SSDs with the same guts as 'The Brands You Know - And Trust". And the difference between the OEM SSD and the Popular brands may only be in the packaging, marketing, and depth and length of warranty. The solid-state disk market is like it's hard platter drive counterpart - SOLID-STATE STORAGE ALREADY IS AND WILL BE A MASSIVE COMMODITY MARKET - that will inevitably have razor-thin margins but become a billion-ssd-drives-per-year industry where there's plenty of razor-thin slices of pie to go around.
